Facebook’s Efforts at Transparency are Predictably Flimsy

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve seen me describe the current state of security in a variety of colorful ways, but my favorite analogy is the one where I liken ourselves to jugglers with many objects in the air and with more being tossed in every minute by hackers and criminals. We lose if we drop a single item, but there is no “win” condition for juggling. If anyone has enough hands and arms to keep a lot of things in the air, it should be Facebook, and they have a lot going on, but in the end, they have come up short on another promise: transparency in sponsored advertising. Facebook’s never ending torrent of fake news was supposed to be somewhat dampened by a tool rolled out in May of this year called “Paid for by” which was built to bring some accountability to Facebook publishing tools heavily abused by political trolls leading up to the 2016 US elections, and surrounding numerous other political events since then.

Transparency or Lip Service?

Just ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Vice.com investigators, through the “Paid for by” tool on Facebook, applied to purchase ads on behalf of all 100 US Senators. All 100 applications were approved, despite the ads being shared from fake political groups built specifically to test Facebook’s transparency tool, and the very obvious fact that Vice investigators are clearly not actual spokespeople for any sitting US Senator. The same tool also allowed the Vice team to buy ads on behalf of Vice President Mike Pence and the Islamic State, but curiously enough, not Hillary Clinton. Based on the amount of effort the Vice team exerted to circumvent the “Paid for by” verification tool, it’s clear that Facebook put an equal amount of effort into building this tool, i.e. virtually none. It’s unclear if the “Paid for by” tool was a token effort put up by Facebook to appease shareholders and lawmakers, or if the problem of fake news on Facebook is truly unsolvable, but if an organization as big and as powerful as Facebook can’t (or won’t) solve this problem, the only other solution is to completely ignore it as a source of news.

And that’s the other problem with elephants on the internet: because of their size, they are hard to ignore.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net