Social networks, after all, are not extensions of the United States government. They are owned by corporations seeking to maximize their growth and profitability, and many of them operate mostly outside the United States. (It’s useful to periodically recall that fewer than 10 percent of Facebook’s users are American.) The social media apparatus that Russia exploited in 2016 — feeds engineered to show users emotionally engaging content, paired with viral sharing mechanisms and self-service advertising platforms — has been enormously profitable for these companies, and remains largely intact.
To the extent that social media giants’ incentives align with America’s national security interests, it is because they fear the wrath of lawmakers and regulators, and because the reputational damage associated with Russia’s 2016 exploitation has dragged down their stock prices and made it harder to recruit.
We shouldn’t hold our breath for these companies to voluntarily self-regulate. Instead, to contain this amorphous threat, we’ll almost certainly have to look elsewhere for help.
First, while pressuring social media companies to take information warfare seriously, the public and the media will need to take steps to make ourselves less vulnerable to influence campaigns, by increasing our fluency with disinformation and media manipulation tactics. As long as tools for targeted digital mass persuasion exist, Russian-style influence operations will be with us. And any new social network competing with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter will need to consider, from Day 1, how propaganda can be kept at bay. It is no longer enough to build a platform, attract millions or billions of users, and then deal with the consequences.
Second, Congress will need to act. Since the 2016 election, we have learned about Russia’s disinformation campaigns in incredible detail, but lawmakers have done virtually nothing to prevent future influence operations. Conventional economic sanctions have not deterred Russia, and efforts to address the threat through legislation — like the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate last year that would require additional transparency from online political advertisers — have gone nowhere.
Two years after the 2016 election, there is still no single federal agency charged with securing American elections from cyberattacks and foreign influence campaigns. Mr. Trump and many other top Republicans have not formally acknowledged the extent of Russia’s 2016 campaign. And although relationships between Silicon Valley tech companies and American intelligence agencies have reportedly improved, there is still more work to be done.
If anything has changed since 2016, it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s the terrain on which our entire political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape our everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are nearly endless. And until we either secure that ground or replace it entirely, we should expect many more attacks, each one in a slightly different form, and each leaving us with even more doubt that what we see online reflects reality, or something close to it.
from Just News Update https://ift.tt/2EpFuEW
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