Facebook hands over the goods
As the US investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election is progressing, it's honing in on social media giants. Politico reported yesterday that the investigation is honing in on Twitter, Facebook and others to investigate how bots, advertising and other tools could have influenced the outcome.
Facebook, after claiming there was no Russian ad buying during the election, backtracked just two weeks ago as the investigation caused the company to come under much more scrutiny.
While it disclosed that more than 3,000 ads were purchased by Russian actors, it didn't provide the actual content of the ads. Now, the company has backtracked that move and plans to share the content of all of them with the investigation team.
Zuckerberg — who is pinky swear not running for the next election we promise — appeared on a weird, brief live stream yesterday to discuss the news.
He finds himself in an interesting pickle, after the company doubled down on showing news in the main feed by juicing the algorithm to prefer widely-shared stories and is now saddled with a fake news problem that's spiraling out of control.
This is a story we're going to continue hearing about for a long time, and given Zuck may eventually need to testify about this, it's probably only going to get even trickier for the company soon.
