Why the fight against disinformation, sham accounts and trolls won’t be any easier in 2020 – By Alexander S. Levine, Nancy Scola, Steven Overly, Cristiano Lima (Politico) / Dec 1 2019
Silicon Valley’s efforts to keep bad actors from manipulating next year’s election face threats that have evolved since 2016.
The big tech companies have announced aggressive steps to keep trolls, bots and online fakery from marring another presidential election — from Facebook’s removal of billions of fake accounts to Twitter’s spurning of all political ads.
But it’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that’s only getting harder as we barrel toward the 2020 election. Disinformation peddlers are deploying new, more subversive techniques and American operatives have adopted some of the deceptive tactics Russians tapped in 2016. Now, tech companies face thorny and sometimes subjective choices about how to combat them — at times drawing flak from both Democrats and Republicans as a result.
This is our roundup of some of the evolving challenges Silicon Valley faces as it tries to counter online lies and bad actors heading into the 2020 election cycle:
1) American trolls may be a greater threat than Russians
Russia-backed trolls notoriously flooded social media with disinformation around the presidential election in 2016, in what Robert Mueller’s investigators described as a multimillion-dollar plot involving years of planning, hundreds of people and a wave of fake accounts posting news and ads on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube.
This time around — as experts have warned — a growing share of the threat is likely to originate in America.
Continue to article: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/01/fight-against-disinformation-2020-election-074422
Since the 2016 election, Google, Facebook and Twitter have devoted security experts and engineers to tackling disinformation in national elections across the globe, including the 2018 midterms in the United States. | Martin Meissner/AP Photo
