Facebook is attempting to fix its latest public relations crisis — trying to convince America that it has owned up to its role in allowing Russia to manipulate the 2016 presidential election — even though one of its executives ranted that they weren’t responsible, with President Donald Trump retweeting his approval.
“The special counsel has issued its indictments, and nothing we found contradicts their conclusions. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong,” Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, said in a statement. Kaplan was almost certainly reacting to a Friday tweetstorm by the website’s vice president of advertising, Rob Goldman.
Very excited to see the Mueller indictment today. We shared Russian ads with Congress, Mueller and the American people to help the public understand how the Russians abused our system. Still, there are keys facts about the Russian actions that are still not well understood.
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election. https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us. It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation.
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
The single best demonstration of Russia's true motives is the Houston anti-islamic protest. Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both the sides of protest. https://t.co/9w1EAl28CH
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
The Russian campaign is ongoing. Just last week saw news that Russian spies attempted to sell a fake video of Trump with a hooker to the NSA. US officials cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian plot to create discord. https://t.co/jO9GwWy2qH
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
There are easy ways to fight this. Disinformation is ineffective against a well educated citizenry. Finland, Sweden and Holland have all taught digital literacy and critical thinking about misinformation to great effect. https://t.co/V0JNvW083W
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
Much to Facebook’s chagrin, Goldman’s tweets were promptly retweeted by Trump, who pointed to them as proof that the ongoing Russia scandal is merely a fabrication of the “fake news media.”
The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman! https://t.co/XGC7ynZwYJ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018
“I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”
Rob Goldman
Vice President of Facebook Ads https://t.co/A5ft7cGJkE— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2018
After Goldman was confronted by a Twitter user about his assertion that Russia hadn’t been trying to influence the 2016 presidential election, he qualified his original statement by insisting that he was “only speaking here about the Russian behavior on Facebook.”
Fair point. I am only speaking here about the Russian behavior on Facebook. That is the only aspect that I observed directly.
— Rob Goldman (@robjective) February 17, 2018
Goldman’s tweetstorm came at a particularly inopportune time for Facebook, which has been trying to repair its damaged post-election image by seeming determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 2016 election. For months during the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian operatives published tens of thousands of posts that reached as many as 126 million Americans.
But, up until last October, Facebook had downplayed the Russian influence. The social network’s initial estimates were that only 10 million Americans had been reached by the propaganda. In the wake of that news, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared that he was “dead serious” about fighting Russian propaganda in the future, according to USA Today.
Yet Mueller’s indictment seemed to shake things up for the company. Although Facebook hasn’t faced any legal consequences as a result of the indictment, Mueller’s investigation concluded that a Russian troll farm had used Facebook more than any other social media platform in order to influence voters. Contrary to Goldman’s claims, the Russian trolls made a deliberate effort to help elect Trump because of their opposition to Hillary Clinton (they also made it clear that they would prefer Bernie Sanders over Clinton as well). Their approach was to create fake identities that would touch on popular political issues so that their messages could be widely reshared to Trump’s benefit.
As the Times explained:
It showed that, years after hostile foreign actors first began using Facebook to wage an information war against the American public, some high-ranking officials within the company still don’t understand just how central Facebook was to Russia’s misinformation campaign, and how consequential the company’s mistakes have been. (Last year, in a tweet that fewer people saw, Andrew Bosworth, another Facebook vice president, claimed that the effects of Russian interference and fake news in 2016 were “marginal, even in a close election.”)
