Facebook May Endanger Democracy, Tech Giant Acknowledges

MENLO PARK, CA — Facebook is slowly coming around to the notion that social media platforms could damage democracy. In a blog post published Monday, Katie Harbath, the site's global politics and government outreach director, said the company first viewed Facebook's impact on society as beneficial.

"The last US presidential campaign changed that, with foreign interference that Facebook should have been quicker to identify to the rise of 'fake news' and echo chambers," she writes. "Now, we’re as determined as ever to fight the negative influences and ensure that our platform is unquestionably a source for democratic good."

Previously, the company had been loath to admit that it could be a negative force in society. In November 2016, shortly after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was elected, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at critics who blamed the social media site's tendency to promote fake news stories for the outcome of the campaign.

"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said at a tech conference.

In another post published Monday, Facebook Product Manager Samidh Chakrabarti wrote, "Although we didn’t know it at the time, we discovered that these Russian actors created 80,000 posts that reached around 126 million people in the US over a two-year period. This kind of activity goes against everything we stand for. It’s abhorrent to us that a nation-state used our platform to wage a cyberwar intended to divide society."

In January 2017, the American intelligence community released a report on its finding that the Russian government engaged in an extensive subversive campaign, which included fake news stories and accounts on social media, to influence the 2016 election. The agencies agreed that the Kremlin aimed to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

Despite Zuckerberg's initial resistance to criticism, it later seemed Facebook was taking more seriously the fact that it might have allowed misleading content to flourish on its platform.

Facebook said in September it planned to provide Congress copies of the 3,000 paid ads it put up during the 2016 election that it believes were bought by Russian entities with the goal of swaying the American democratic process.

"We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election," Colin Stretch, general counsel for Facebook, said then in a statement.

Read the full posts from Facebook>>

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