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Google has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited its platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, according to the Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n It says tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents\u00a0who were aiming to spread disinformation across Google\u2019s products \u2014 including its video content platform YouTube but also via advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company\u2019s DoubleClick ad network.<\/p>\n The newspaper says its report is based on information provided by people familiar with Google\u2019s investigation into whether Kremlin-affiliated entities sought to use its platforms to spread disinformation online.<\/p>\n Asked for confirmation of the report, a Google spokesman told us: \u201cWe have a set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion. We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries.\u201d<\/p>\n So it\u2019s telling that Google is not out-and-out denying the report \u2014 suggesting the company has indeed found something via its internal investigation, though isn\u2019t ready to go public with whatever it\u2019s unearthed as yet.<\/p>\n what we’ve seen so far is the tip of the iceberghttps:\/\/t.co\/i2eeMygldD<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) October 9, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all been\u00a0called to testify<\/a>\u00a0to a Senate Intelligence Committee on November 1 which is examining how social media platforms may have been used by foreign actors to influence the 2016 US election.<\/p>\n Last month Facebook\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0Russian agents had utilized its platform in an apparent attempt to sew social division across the U.S. by purchasing $100,000 of targeted advertising (some 3,000+ ads \u2014 though the more pertinent question is how far Facebook\u2019s platform organically spread the malicious content; Facebook has claimed<\/a> only around 10M users saw the Russian ads, though others believe the actual figure is likely to be\u00a0far higher<\/a>.)<\/p>\n CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to get out ahead of the incoming political and regulatory tide by announcing, at the start of this month, that the company will make ad buys more transparent<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 even as the U.S. election agency is running a public consultation<\/a> on whether to extend political ad disclosure rules to digital platforms.<\/p>\n (And, lest we forget, late last year he entirely dismissed the notion of Facebook influencing the election as \u201ca pretty crazy idea\u201d \u2014 words he\u2019s since said he regrets<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Safe to say, tech\u2019s platform giants are now facing the political grilling of their lives, and on home soil, as well as the prospect of the kind of regulation they\u2019ve always argued against finally being looped around them.<\/p>\n But perhaps their greatest potential danger is the risk of huge reputational damage if users learn to mistrust the information being algorithmically pushed at them \u2014 seeing instead something dubious<\/a> that may even have actively malicious intent.<\/p>\n While much of the commentary around the US election social media probe has, thus far, focused on Facebook, all major tech platforms could well be implicated as paid aids for foreign entities trying to influence U.S. public opinion \u2014 or at least any\/all whose business entails applying algorithms to order and distribute third party content at scale.<\/p>\n Just a few days ago<\/a>, for instance, Facebook said it had found Russian ads on its photo sharing platform Instagram, too.<\/p>\n In Google\u2019s case the company controls vastly powerful search ranking algorithms, as well as ordering user generated content on its massively popular video platform YouTube.<\/p>\n And late last year\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0suggested Google\u2019s algorithmic search suggestions had been weaponized by an organized far right campaign \u2014 highlighting how its algorithms appeared to be promoting racist, nazi ideologies and misogyny in search results.<\/p>\n (Though criticism of tech platform algorithms being weaponized by fringe groups to drive skewed narratives into the mainstream dates back further still \u2014 such as to the #Gamergate fallout, in 2014, when we warned<\/a>\u00a0that popular online channels were being gamed to drive misogyny into\u00a0the\u00a0mainstream media<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0all over social media<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Responding to The Guardian\u2019s criticism of its algorithms last year, Google claimed: \u201cOur search results are a reflection of the content across the web. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what search results appear for a given query. These results don\u2019t reflect Google\u2019s own opinions or beliefs \u2014 as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n But it looks like the ability of tech giants to shrug off questions and concerns about their algorithmic operations \u2014 and how they may be being subverted by hostile entities \u2014 has drastically shrunk.<\/p>\n According to the Washington Post, the Russian buyers of Google ads do not appear to be\u00a0from the same Kremlin-affiliated\u00a0troll farm which bought ads on\u00a0Facebook \u2014 which it suggests is a sign that the disinformation campaign could be \u201ca\u00a0much broader problem than\u00a0Silicon Valley companies have\u00a0unearthed\u00a0so far\u201d.<\/p>\n Late last month\u00a0Twitter also said<\/a> it had found hundreds of accounts linked to Russian operatives. And the newspaper\u2019s sources claim that Google used developer access to Twitter\u2019s firehose of historical tweet data to triangulate its own internal investigation into Kremlin ad buys \u2014 linking Russian Twitter accounts to accounts buying ads on its platform in order to identify malicious spend trickling into its own coffers.<\/p>\n A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment on this specific claim but pointed to a lengthy\u00a0blog post<\/a> it penned late last month \u2014 on \u201cRussian Interference in 2016 US Election, Bots, Misinformation\u201d. In that Twitter disclosed that the RT (formerly Russia Today) news network spent almost $275,000 on U.S. ads on Twitter in 2016.<\/p>\n It also said that of the 450 accounts Facebook had shared as part of its review into Russian election interference Twitter had \u201cconcluded\u201d that 22 had \u201ccorresponding accounts on Twitter\u201d \u2014 which it also said had either been suspended (mostly) for spam or were suspended after being identified.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the coming weeks and months, we\u2019ll be rolling out several changes to the actions we take when we detect spammy or suspicious activity, including introducing new and escalating enforcements for suspicious logins, Tweets, and engagements, and shortening the amount of time suspicious accounts remain visible on Twitter while pending confirmation. These are not meant to be definitive solutions. We\u2019ve been fighting against these issues for years, and as long as there are people trying to manipulate Twitter, we will be working hard to stop them,\u201d Twitter added.<\/p>\n As in the case with the political (and sometimes commercial<\/a>) pressure also being applied on tech platforms to speed up takedowns of online extremism<\/a>, it seems logical that the platforms could improve internal efforts to thwart malicious use of their tools by sharing more information with each other.<\/p>\n In June<\/a> Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Twitter collectively announced a new partnership aimed at reducing the accessibility of internet services to terrorists, for instance \u2014 dubbing it the\u00a0Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and aiming to build on an earlier announcement<\/a> of an industry database for sharing unique digital fingerprints to identify terrorist content.<\/p>\n But whether some similar kind of collaboration could emerge in future to try to collectively police political spending remains to be seen. Joining forces to tackle the spread of terrorist propaganda online may end up being trivially easy vs accurately identifying and publicly disclosing what is clearly a much broader spectrum of politicized content that\u2019s, nonetheless, also been created with malicious intent.<\/p>\n\n