This post was made on 11/8/2018.
Facebook announced on Tuesday that they banned over 100 accounts on Facebook due to “inauthentic behavior”. Interestingly, these accounts also had links to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). These accounts falsely claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcing agents were patrolling the voting booths during the 2018 midterm elections. These accounts were banned before the midterms by Facebook thanks to their fishy behavior.
Facebook has been stating that they have been taking care of this issue over the past year and have been getting a lot of coverage from the press telling them to not let outsiders have an influence on our political elections. Facebook has been heavily scrutinized for allowing this type of behavior on their platform, which is understandable, but we should also be keeping a sharp eye on our other social media platforms as well.
Both Twitter and Reddit are culprits for having Russian hackers on their websites, yet we don’t seem to criticize them as harshly as we do on Facebook. Now I’m not saying we should also outrage against Reddit and Twitter, you can blame them for what happened in the 2016 elections, but who could have seen what power social media had in the elections? Social media is still a fairly new idea to us. The fact that we can write something and communicate it to the rest of the world in seconds is incredible! Social media has truly transformed us in a way that makes information quickly and easily accessible for the first time ever. We don’t fully understand this and neither do social media corporations, but that doesn’t mean we should let them off the hook so easily.
Hopefully social media platforms will learn from this whole “Russian hacker” situation and make a system that prohibits this type of behavior in the future because I have a sneaking suspicion other countries are going to try and do this type of political interference during election seasons. China has already shown that they are completely capable of attacking us with cyber attacks, so there’s no saying whether or not they already had an influence on the 2016 or 2018 elections. This just means it’s time for big social media companies to find a liable solution to this predicament they are in, because if they don’t we could have a political and cultural mess that could do some serious damage.
Source: Facebook Bans more Russian Hackers Before the Midterm Elections
Cyberleech 