Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation
Source: Washington Post
Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation
By Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin October 12 at 11:42 AM
Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that and maybe much more if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.
Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything thousands of Facebook posts and the related data that had made the work possible.
Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier.
This is public interest data, Albright said Wednesday, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared or at least moved somewhere the public cant see it. This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.
Facebook does not dispute it removed the posts, but it offers a different explanation of what happened. The company says it has merely corrected a bug that allowed Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place. That bug, Facebook says, has now been squashed on a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/12/facebook-takes-down-data-and-thousands-of-posts-obscuring-reach-of-russian-disinformation/
benld74
(9,909 posts)guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)disalitervisum
(470 posts)stuffmatters
(2,574 posts)Absolutely appalling. Facebook is freely destroying evidence and essential data in the case of Facebook's for profit selling of Americans' personal data that allowed Russia(via Cambridge Analaytica) to psychologically target & persuade American voters.
FakeNoose
(32,703 posts)Let's see if anybody in the Senate or House of Respresentatives is interested in doing that.
Anybody ... at all?
BigmanPigman
(51,620 posts)Dan
(3,577 posts)Run incremental backups,
Daily backups,
Weekly backups,
Monthly backups,
Quarterly backups,
Yearly backups...
Once there it is forever...