Facebook Knows More About Russia’s Election Meddling. Shouldn’t We?
• What all of those ads looked like
• What specific information – or disinformation — they were spreading
• Who or what the accounts pretended to be
• How many Americans interacted with the ads or the fake personae
We also don’t know what geographical locations the alleged social media saboteurs were targeting (The regular list of swing states and counties?
“We now know that foreign interests can run campaign ads — sham issue ads — in this country without anyone having any knowledge of who was behind it, and
that fundamentally violates a basic concept of campaign finance laws,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for greater regulation of political spending through his group Democracy21.
It was an effort that involved “the American companies
that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda,” as The Times’s Scott Shane noted in his penetrating investigation earlier this month.
On Friday, I asked Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, or Epic, an advocacy group, where he stood on the question..
“The best case for that is that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech,” he said.
The Russian effort was able to elude those laws through social media, where the system has clearly — and fundamentally — broken down.
