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Russia's attempts to interfere in last year's presidential election got a big boost from an unwitting player - Facebook. Russian operatives set up fake s on the network to reach Americans and that is despite a longstanding Facebook rule that requires s to go by their real names. NPR's Ryan Lucas looks at how well the social media giant is stamping out fake s.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: So I'm sitting at my desk on the fourth floor of NPR's headquarters in Washington, and I have decided to set up a Facebook , but I'm not going to use my own name - going to be a fake , so here we go.
That was easy. It took less than a minute and I wondered - what stops anyone else from doing this?
LISA-MARIA NEUDERT: Personally, I am not on Facebook with my real name. When I first signed up in 2008, I signed up with a made-up identity, and nobody has ever ed me about not being on Facebook with my real name.
LUCAS: That's Lisa-Maria Neudert. She's a researcher with the computation and propaganda project at the Oxford Internet Institute in England. She and I, it turns out, are two of an unknown number of fake s among Facebook's some 2 billion worldwide. Requiring authenticity gives Facebook a reason to take fake s down, but it doesn't help the company find them. For that, Facebook largely relies on reports from s, and that, experts say, is not a recipe for success.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Facebook can't expect s who have been fooled to stop being fooled by a fake . You know, if a fake is well-designed, you know, it's going to draw people in.
LUCAS: That's Siva Vaidhyanathan. He's a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and the author of an book on Facebook.
VAIDHYANATHAN: Relying on s to cleanse and police other Facebook s is never going to get the job done.
LUCAS: And there is indeed plenty of evidence that Americans have been fooled by Russian government-sponsored fake s. Congressional investigators recently documented two inauthentic s - one called Heart of Texas and the other called United Muslims of America - that had hundreds of thousands of followers apiece. They even managed to sponsor dueling protests in the streets of Houston in 2016. Neudert notes that the Russian-run phony s were highly credible and highly sophisticated. They had fully drawn characters with few signs that would draw suspicion.
NEUDERT: For anyone to really detect those s as fake s is going to be a highly sophisticated task as well.
LUCAS: Most Facebook s aren't paying attention that closely. What else is Facebook doing to try to address the problem? Well, the company says it's hiring more people to review ads on its platform, and it's also investing in technology. This is Facebook's general counsel Colin Stretch.
COLIN STRETCH: The investment we are making and the commitment we are making is to ensure that our authenticity policy is more effectively policed and monitored to prevent exactly this sort of behavior.
LUCAS: Again, Vaidhyanathan.
VAIDHYANATHAN: There's always a hint that, you know, some elaborate artificial intelligence or machine learning system is just on the horizon and will help us scour Facebook and get rid of all of the junk. But the fact is those systems are many years off.
LUCAS: So if s are bad at spotting well-crafted fake s and the technological silver bullet is still a ways off, what are we to do? s should bear in mind as they scroll through their news feed and glance at ads that the platform is vulnerable to manipulation, including by a foreign spy service up to no good. Top U.S. intelligence officials have warned that influence campaigns like the Russians ran around the 2016 election aren't going to stop. In fact, they say, they're the new normal. Again, Vaidhyanathan.
VAIDHYANATHAN: And if Vladimir Putin had ordered a bunch of his favorite software engineers to design a propaganda system that would infiltrate the political environment of Ukraine and Poland and Hungary and even the United States, he could not have developed anything more effective than Facebook.
LUCAS: For the record, that new of mine is still kicking online. Don't forget to friend me if you can find me. Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
