"The Verge": After taking action against misinformation, outside interference and data leakage

The impact of "communication" platforms declined in the US elections

An evaluation of "The Verge" confirmed that social networks solved the problems of the 2016 elections. From the source

An initial evaluation of the performance of major social media platforms, during the recent US presidential elections, showed a clear decline in false and misleading news, outside interference, breaching users' privacy, and leaking their data on a large scale, indicating that the series of countermeasures to these matters taken by the platforms, worked in a way. Marked positive.

The assessment was conducted by analysts at the technology website "The Verge", and its results were published the day before yesterday, hours before the announcement of Joe Biden's victory in the elections, as analysts compared the performance of social media platforms during the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Evaluation

The evaluation of "The Verge" confirmed that social networks solved the problems of the 2016 elections to a large extent, but the 2020 elections themselves had bigger problems, many of them far from social media.

The evaluation addressed the three biggest problems that receded during the 2020 elections, as follows:

Misleading news

This problem is related to false stories and fabricated news published by some activists, spammers, and other profit seekers. It is a problem that overwhelms Facebook, and often surpasses real news stories, and leads to the generation of millions of interactions all the time.

Facebook admitted that fake news created a problem with its brand, as the Facebook news feed was viewed as a cash generator for the company, as a home welcoming deception and spam, which made the company's fortunes vulnerable in the long run. This prompted Facebook to develop a network of fact-checkers and false news, and added prominent labels to contested stories. More importantly, the site changed its news feed algorithm, preferring posts generated by friends over news feeds and links coming from publishers.

The peak

According to analysts, when the 2020 elections entered the climax stage, "robotic" calls, text messages and e-mails became the "main place" for misinformation, not communication networks, and this is for the electronic space. Outside the cyberspace, some television stations, especially stations, have advanced. Cable », and preceded communication platforms.

External interference

The second major problem, which was associated with the communication platforms in the 2016 elections, was external interference, the most prominent manifestation of which was the Russian Internet Research Agency, by pumping content, either directly or through paid ads, aimed at sowing division and deepening polarization in America, using fake accounts. .

Facebook faced external interference in the recent US presidential elections by expanding the team responsible for what it called the "integrity of the statute," which are groups of full-time employees and contractors who work on supervising content.

HTC Privacy

Communication platforms suffered during the 2016 elections from data leaks, breaching the privacy of users, and reusing their data for advertising and electoral purposes. The culmination of the matter came with the scandal of the "Cambridge Analytica" company, which leaked data on about 75 million people who use Facebook to parties linked to the elections. And advertising campaigns and advertisements, to be used either commercially, or to influence attitudes and opinions, and over the past years, communication platforms have taken strict measures to raise the level of protection of users' personal data.

As for Facebook, it changed the policies and algorithms for dealing with personal data, especially with regard to the methods and conditions for obtaining data used in “application programming interfaces”, as well as Twitter and YouTube, and this resulted in better protection of privacy. In the 2020 elections.

'Safety of the statute'

The "Safety of the Basic System" team, which Facebook established to confront foreign interference in the elections, now includes more than 30,000 people, including experts who previously worked for the CIA and helped Facebook eliminate the operations of influencing the elections. For example, before the start of the last elections, members of the team had removed dozens of new campaigns from the IRA alone.