Speaker 1: When you're a journalist covering Facebook like I am, you
Speaker 1: get a lot of messages from people who really just
Speaker 1: wish they could talk to Facebook. This fall, I got several.
Speaker 1: A friend was worried that Facebook was marking her wedding
Speaker 1: photos as spam. A man was worried that traffic to
Speaker 1: his music fan page had gone down. Then I was
Speaker 1: contacted on Twitter by a man in Sri Lanka. The
Speaker 1: man's name was Oshallah. He said he used to work
Speaker 1: for the current president, Mitro Pola Crisena. As proof, he
Speaker 1: sent me his offer letter for the job with the
Speaker 1: president working on social media for the state. He also
Speaker 1: sent me a picture of his government I d Oshalla
Speaker 1: said he'd been in contact with Facebook while he was
Speaker 1: working for the government. He sent us a link to
Speaker 1: a photo from a meeting that he said took place
Speaker 1: in six It showed Oshalla standing next to the president
Speaker 1: as well as a woman called Anki. Thus, she's Facebook's
Speaker 1: public policy director for India and South and Central Asia.
Speaker 1: So we started talking politicians in Sri Lanka. Now they
Speaker 1: are doing a lot with Facebook. They advertise they maintained pages,
Speaker 1: most of them have teams managing them. UH new media
Speaker 1: websites planting news good news better so they U see.
Speaker 1: Oshalla wanted to talk about the Sri Lankan government and
Speaker 1: the way the president was using Facebook. He claimed that
Speaker 1: Facebook had allowed the Sri Lankan government special privileges and
Speaker 1: that the government was using it to silence its critics
Speaker 1: and cemented its script on power. Hi, I'm Pa got
Speaker 1: Cary and I'm Sarah Fryar. And this week on Decrypted,
Speaker 1: as part of our special series on Unintended Consequences of technology,
Speaker 1: will take a look at how Facebook has courted policy
Speaker 1: co leaders looking to curry favor in new markets in
Speaker 1: its mission to connect the world. But the company of
Speaker 1: policy of offering special services and training to political candidates
Speaker 1: and government officials may have also inadvertently created an opening
Speaker 1: for some leaders to manipulate the platform. Facebook pages can
Speaker 1: give politicians a way to spread their message, monitor the opposition,
Speaker 1: and make a person or agency seem more popular than
Speaker 1: perhaps they really are. Behind the scenes, Facebook was poorly
Speaker 1: equipped to stop the misuse. You've probably already heard about
Speaker 1: how Russia tried to use social media in the run
Speaker 1: up to the US presidential election, but in other countries,
Speaker 1: the manipulation is coming from inside the government itself. Stay
Speaker 1: with us. So, Sarah, let's go back to the end
Speaker 1: of the year. A brutal civil war had just ended
Speaker 1: a few years earlier, and Sri Lanka was under the
Speaker 1: rule of President Mahinda Rajapaksa Russia. Paksa had already been
Speaker 1: in power for a decade and had a growing reputation
Speaker 1: as a strong man without much regard for democracy. In
Speaker 1: the final weeks of the year, he called a snap election. Initially,
Speaker 1: nobody was running against him. That's when his former health minister,
Speaker 1: a man called ma Tripala Sirisena, stepped forward. Amad me on.
Speaker 1: When I spoke to Shaala Hara, the man who reached
Speaker 1: out to me on Twitter, he said he had felt
Speaker 1: electrified by Sara Sanna's decision to run the previous regime.
Speaker 1: He was like a bit of a dictator and the
Speaker 1: media was suppressed and so on and so so. The
Speaker 1: I also personally decided that you should do something suppout
Speaker 1: the common candidate. Shalla called Citizena the common candidate because
Speaker 1: he became the common choice of all the political parties
Speaker 1: to run against Rajapaksa. Even the main opposition party supported
Speaker 1: him instead of their own candidate. At the time, Oshalla
Speaker 1: said he was running a Facebook page called u p
Speaker 1: f A A Brighter Future, which he says was pretty popular.
Speaker 1: U p f A stands for United People's Freedom Alliance
Speaker 1: and it's one of the political parties in Sri Lanka.
Speaker 1: He said he started it in two and used to
Speaker 1: post mainly about politics. Oshalla said he thought this new candidate, Citizener,
Speaker 1: would be a change for the country, so he decided
Speaker 1: to use the reach of his Facebook page to help
Speaker 1: and the next forty days we just volunteered in his campaign,
Speaker 1: and within forty days the page members grew from thirty
Speaker 1: to about two hundred fifty thou and every day we
Speaker 1: were getting about three d likes. Three hundred thousand likes
Speaker 1: on Facebook was a big number back in Sri Lanka
Speaker 1: is an island nation of about twenty one million people
Speaker 1: and Facebook was still catching on. But Servisna recognized this
Speaker 1: platform offered away for him to connect directly with potential voters,
Speaker 1: and Oshalla was ready to help. I wanted to do
Speaker 1: so many things with social media because people saw that
Speaker 1: election as a revolution through social media. Because all mainstream
Speaker 1: media was on one side with the previous UH regime
Speaker 1: only one TV channel. One series was like UH supporting
Speaker 1: the common candidate or being opened with the election, So
Speaker 1: the social media was the one with was the open platform.
Speaker 1: Then in January, citizen and won the election. Sri Lanka
Speaker 1: took Matthew are a commas artist mind the days. Mama
Speaker 1: main than my family lives in Sri Lanka and I
Speaker 1: remember this was a big surprise when it happened. Internationally,
Speaker 1: his victory was seen as a sign that Sri Lanka
Speaker 1: was rejecting a strongman leader and respecting the democratic process,
Speaker 1: so there was a lot of hope. Oshalla told me
Speaker 1: that after Service Sanna's victory, he was offered a job
Speaker 1: on the president's social media team. He said yes, and
Speaker 1: soon after starting he reached out to Facebook. Oshla says
Speaker 1: he wanted to work with the company to help more
Speaker 1: Sri Lankan's get online. At the time, Facebook was actively
Speaker 1: trying to spread the Internet as part of its mission
Speaker 1: to make the world more open and more connected. It's
Speaker 1: easy to see why this has been a goal for
Speaker 1: the company. There are humanitarian reasons internet access is good.
Speaker 1: At the same time, having more people online equals more
Speaker 1: connections on Facebook. More connection means more activity, and ultimately,
Speaker 1: more activity means more growth for the company. So Facebook
Speaker 1: started ramping up its work with governments around the world.
Speaker 1: It connected with them to spread internet access, but it
Speaker 1: also worked on more mundane things like official Facebook pages
Speaker 1: and campaign ads. The role that Facebook has played with
Speaker 1: governments across the world has really grown as the company
Speaker 1: has grown. That's Lauren Etta. She's our colleague here at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg who has done a lot of reporting on how
Speaker 1: governments have used Facebook around the world. And Facebook would
Speaker 1: pretty much work with anybody. They would work with any
Speaker 1: candidate that was speaking to increase their outreach, increase the
Speaker 1: reach and brought in their based on the platform. Oshaa
Speaker 1: says he connected with the company's political unit, and before
Speaker 1: long a team from Facebook arrived in the country ready
Speaker 1: to help. In the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has
Speaker 1: spoken frequently about how more openness is generally a good
Speaker 1: thing and has vowed to combat misuse on his platform.
Speaker 1: I also recently talked to the head of Facebook's political unit,
Speaker 1: who told me that she's making sure that governments follow
Speaker 1: the same rules as everyone else. So Facebook had put
Speaker 1: down roots in Sri Lanka and it had spread quickly
Speaker 1: across the country, but before long problems started to crop up.
Speaker 1: What we saw on Facebook was um that bad fat actors,
Speaker 1: um we're coming increasing in increasing numbers and producing and
Speaker 1: promoting content from an extremist Buddhist nationalist perspective that was
Speaker 1: inciting hit and violence that san Janatata he's a senior
Speaker 1: researcher at the Center for Policy Alternatives in a founding
Speaker 1: editor of Groundview Style or a journalism organization in Sri Lanka. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: this was around the same time that this started to
Speaker 1: happen in Myanma as well. This hateful content that Sanjana
Speaker 1: was seeing was a total contrast to the narrative around
Speaker 1: Facebook and other parts of the world at that time.
Speaker 1: This was a time when Facebook was basking in the
Speaker 1: glow of the Arab Spring, and there was a general
Speaker 1: euphoria and optimism about the potential of the platform to
Speaker 1: contribute to democracy and bringing the word closer together. As
Speaker 1: far as Sanjana knew, Facebook didn't have any content moderators
Speaker 1: who were fluent in Sri Lanka's local languages. Simila and
Speaker 1: tamiel So Ground Views, the organization he helped to found
Speaker 1: started publishing reports about this hate speech and hoping to
Speaker 1: raise awareness of the problem. Oshana told me that even
Speaker 1: though he was working for the government, he saw the
Speaker 1: trends too. It was an easy platform for people with
Speaker 1: listed interest to plant fake news, insult people, harass people.
Speaker 1: There is no way to find out who is doing
Speaker 1: it or it's like people can do any damage to
Speaker 1: any person anonymously. He told me that he even tried
Speaker 1: to talk to Facebook about it when its team came
Speaker 1: to Sri Lanka. So we at that point President requested
Speaker 1: Social Facebook to have some sort of a system to
Speaker 1: regulate all these things, and we asked them to, if possible,
Speaker 1: to help us to teach do programs to help people
Speaker 1: to have move awareness of how to use Facebook Facebook
Speaker 1: tools in order to protect themselves. But Oshalla says Facebook
Speaker 1: wanted to help with other things like verifying political pages
Speaker 1: and expanding in the country, and wasn't as concerned with
Speaker 1: the other problems that across being up. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Facebook was quickly becoming a critical part of how people
Speaker 1: got online and got the news, and governments around the
Speaker 1: world we're realizing this too. Sometimes officials worked harmoniously with
Speaker 1: Facebook to connect people and make more public information available,
Speaker 1: but they also leaned on the platform as a campaign
Speaker 1: tool his Lauren again, So slowly, Facebook became kind of
Speaker 1: an appendage to many of these political campaigns to the
Speaker 1: point where they would they would essentially have a Facebook
Speaker 1: operative inside many of the major campaigns around the world,
Speaker 1: from the Philippines to India, UM to the United States. UM.
Speaker 1: As we know in the United States, Facebook was was
Speaker 1: critical to a Trump campaign. Governments became acutely aware of
Speaker 1: Facebook's power to either help them or hurt them. They
Speaker 1: started to realize that social media was an extremely high
Speaker 1: stakes game. So basically Facebook predicated this notion that they
Speaker 1: were going to change the world, and they you know,
Speaker 1: they were. They were very prominent during the Air Spring
Speaker 1: and critical to these uplisings that happened across the Middle East,
Speaker 1: and everybody widely viewed Facebook as the platform for democratic action,
Speaker 1: and it was. But as the tools spread from countries
Speaker 1: from around the Middle East to other places around the world,
Speaker 1: you inevitably and inevitably ended up in the hands of
Speaker 1: governments and leaders that were not interested in democracy. So
Speaker 1: you have this tool that's supposed to be neutral in
Speaker 1: this platform that's supposed to be this great equalizer for
Speaker 1: the public and governments in many cases are using it
Speaker 1: to share public information, but they're also using it for
Speaker 1: their own political ends. And this strategy worked great for Facebook,
Speaker 1: which was making money from political content people were posting
Speaker 1: and sharing on the platform. For Facebook, they saw very
Speaker 1: early on that elections were like any other major event
Speaker 1: that drew lots of people to their platform. In time,
Speaker 1: elections became like they drew in the same number of
Speaker 1: users as say the Super Bowl or say the Olympics.
Speaker 1: So because Facebook is essentially an advertising platform, they saw
Speaker 1: this as a huge opportunity to cash in on a
Speaker 1: massive audience. And not only was it a big audience,
Speaker 1: but it was a very engaged audience, And that's a
Speaker 1: very critical point to understand. In Sri Lanka. It was
Speaker 1: so successful that people spent most of their time online
Speaker 1: on the platform, but Facebook didn't seem to take into
Speaker 1: account what could happen when online communities became the main
Speaker 1: source of news in a country with unstable politics. By
Speaker 1: the start of this year, long standing tensions were running
Speaker 1: high in Sri Lanka. Rumors were going viral on Facebook
Speaker 1: saying that the country's small number of Muslims wanted to
Speaker 1: wipe out the country's Buddhist majority. One of the fake
Speaker 1: posts alleged that Muslim pharmacies were distributing sterilization pills and
Speaker 1: putting them into people's food. The toxic content Sanjina had
Speaker 1: been tracking on Facebook for years had finally broken into
Speaker 1: the real world. Extremists from the Buddhist community, people with
Speaker 1: large followings, were using the social network to plot real
Speaker 1: world attacks. Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency after
Speaker 1: mob attacks on Muslim communities by hardline Buddhists. A curfew
Speaker 1: has been put in place in the district of Candy.
Speaker 1: At the groups of Buddhists attacked Muslim owned businesses, homes
Speaker 1: and a mosque. A few days of panic followed. Violent
Speaker 1: incidents seemed to be spreading out from Candy to elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the country, spurred on by social media. Then the
Speaker 1: government decided to act. It took an extraordinary step. The
Speaker 1: government shut down Facebook access, blocked access to the platform
Speaker 1: in the country and I think that is what for
Speaker 1: you know, raised the profile of the country at Facebook's officers.
Speaker 1: So Facebook was blocked across the country and in some areas,
Speaker 1: the whole Internet went down. I remember this vividly because
Speaker 1: my family lives in Sri Lanka and without access to
Speaker 1: WhatsApp and other internet calling services, we were cut off
Speaker 1: for a few days. The government justified the internet shutdown
Speaker 1: by saying it was trying to stop the flow of
Speaker 1: false information. The violence subsided after a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: The Internet was restored across Sri Lanka and Facebook service
Speaker 1: resumed as normal. But the incidents showed not just how
Speaker 1: dangerous online networks can be, but who ultimately controls access
Speaker 1: to them. Until the shutdown, san Jana never knew for
Speaker 1: sure whether his research flagging Sri Lanka's hate speech problem
Speaker 1: on Facebook ever even registered with the company. We you know,
Speaker 1: sent it to the publicly available email interessers of Facebook
Speaker 1: that were available to us. They were the individual they
Speaker 1: were institutionals, So we don't know who it was read by,
Speaker 1: if any, and if it was read, how it was
Speaker 1: escalated within the company and to whom, when, why, or where.
Speaker 1: So we didn't get any response whatsoever in all the
Speaker 1: years that we did the research, But after the shutdown,
Speaker 1: Facebook started paying attention. His lack of access is not
Speaker 1: unusual a lot of people outside the government try to
Speaker 1: get in touch with Facebook and just can't find anyone
Speaker 1: to talk to. And once Charlotte left, supposed to the government,
Speaker 1: he tried to flag abuse to his old contacts of
Speaker 1: the company. When he did, he got blocked. He actually
Speaker 1: showed me the messages. Oshalla's issues were separate from the
Speaker 1: violence that had broken out across the country. He was
Speaker 1: trying to tell Facebook that the government itself was manipulating
Speaker 1: pages on the platform. Here's an example. One wrong thing
Speaker 1: is what government did changing a page name and using
Speaker 1: audience which are not truly their followers as they are,
Speaker 1: to show that they are a bit popular and they
Speaker 1: have numbers. And the second thing Facebook, without looking into it,
Speaker 1: they endorsed it and they verified it. This might not
Speaker 1: sound like a big deal, but this is an example
Speaker 1: of how easy it is to be deceptive on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Oshalla told us he found out that the government took
Speaker 1: a popular joke page and branded it as a political page.
Speaker 1: They basically co opted a page with a bunch of
Speaker 1: followers already making the administration look more popular online, and
Speaker 1: then Facebook actually verified the page, putting a blue check
Speaker 1: mark by it. Oshalla was able to see what the
Speaker 1: government was doing because of a transparency tool that Facebook
Speaker 1: itself added recently. It lets people know things like who
Speaker 1: owns a page and previous names the page used to have.
Speaker 1: We looked and it showed that the page was in
Speaker 1: fact previously a joke page. Facebook would of course have
Speaker 1: had access to this information, but it appears the company
Speaker 1: verified it anyway, so that page is still up and meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Oshalla is still blocked by the Facebook rep he reached
Speaker 1: out to. We reached out to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission
Speaker 1: of Sri Lanka to ask them about the government's practice
Speaker 1: of renaming Facebook pages, but we never heard back. This
Speaker 1: isn't the only case of a government finding a way
Speaker 1: to manipulate public perception on Facebook. Researchers have found that
Speaker 1: the tactics that the Russian government used to influence public
Speaker 1: opinion in the US presidential election were honed and perfected
Speaker 1: on Russia's own population first and in the Philippines. Bloomberg
Speaker 1: has reported how the journalist Maria Ressa tried at least
Speaker 1: three separate times, including in person, with Mark Zuckerberg, to
Speaker 1: ask the company to take action against fake news and
Speaker 1: online harassment. A Facebook director said at the time that
Speaker 1: it would take down hate speech targeted at journalists when
Speaker 1: it was reported to the company. Facebook said that its
Speaker 1: policy allows negative comments, but will act when it crosses
Speaker 1: the line into hate speech or threats. Going forward, there
Speaker 1: are a few things Facebook can do better to serve
Speaker 1: its users in countries like Sri Lanka. Facebook knows that
Speaker 1: it needs to dedicate more resources to low called language operations.
Speaker 1: Sri Lanka has two main languages, Sinhala and Tamil, and
Speaker 1: until recently, Facebook had very few people working in these languages,
Speaker 1: so the company couldn't tell if a post was full
Speaker 1: of hate speech, for example, and the things in Sri
Speaker 1: Lanka mostly people communicated language and our own to take
Speaker 1: single language and Facebook, that's a huge gap. They don't
Speaker 1: They can't uh understand the content even though it is
Speaker 1: here speach whatever. Oshalla says that it's easy to create
Speaker 1: fake accounts. That's because people in Sri Lanka often have
Speaker 1: multiple names, so if Facebook asks for verification, one idea
Speaker 1: could cover several accounts. He also explained how easy it
Speaker 1: was to buy popular pages from others. He showed me
Speaker 1: a couple of marketplaces that were active, but Facebook executives
Speaker 1: are investing in learning more about Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka
Speaker 1: is the first country in the world in all its
Speaker 1: markets that it does announced that it's going to proactively
Speaker 1: take down missingful that are escalation channels now available for
Speaker 1: civil society to report content. Fake news isn't against the
Speaker 1: rules on Facebook, but the company recently made a policy
Speaker 1: banning fake news that incites violence, so it took down
Speaker 1: those pages we talked about that were related to the
Speaker 1: sterilization pills and food. Facebook itself, I think has undertaken
Speaker 1: reviews of its content curation, moderation, oversight capabilities and capacities.
Speaker 1: They have assured us that there are more moderators or
Speaker 1: people who are responsible for kind of maintaining the health
Speaker 1: of the public discourse on the platforms. What we don't know, however,
Speaker 1: is how many they are. Well. Santina is waiting for
Speaker 1: Facebook to say how many moderators they now have focused
Speaker 1: on Sri Lanka. He did say that he's been in
Speaker 1: contact with the company about related matters in recent months,
Speaker 1: and finally, executives are making trips of the country and
Speaker 1: working with local organization now to talk about threats. So
Speaker 1: Sarah I mean, one of the things that really struck
Speaker 1: me as we were working on this episode together is
Speaker 1: Facebook wasn't better prepared for the fact that politicians might
Speaker 1: try to use the platform to spread propaganda. One thing
Speaker 1: that's been clear overall about Facebook in the past years
Speaker 1: is that they kind of just focused on growth. They
Speaker 1: just wanted to get bigger and do whatever it took
Speaker 1: to get people connected to Facebook, and their mission is,
Speaker 1: you know, connecting the world and didn't quite think at
Speaker 1: all about the consequences of that connection or really the
Speaker 1: strategy to achieve it. So are they now trying to
Speaker 1: recalibrate their approach to training political candidates. Well, the United
Speaker 1: Nations has come out and called them out for their
Speaker 1: role in some violence in Myanmer and other countries. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's coming to a head. There's a lot of screw
Speaker 1: me over Facebook's sort of way of working, and the
Speaker 1: company is looking into this and trying to invest in
Speaker 1: it more. But you know, for people like sanjoh, it
Speaker 1: like this is this is stuff that Facebook should have
Speaker 1: been aware of, that they were alerted to as early
Speaker 1: as and it shouldn't have taken until raging violence in
Speaker 1: a country for them to really get to it. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I guess on that point, Sanjina definitely has a point.
Speaker 1: I wonder in light of all of the scrutiny and
Speaker 1: also these kind of changes that they're making to their approach,
Speaker 1: is the company kind of moderating the way the activities
Speaker 1: that it's political unit get involved with. That's like the
Speaker 1: central problem here, right, is that, like in these countries
Speaker 1: or people don't necessarily have as much experience with the Internet,
Speaker 1: the governments are getting trained and the users are not,
Speaker 1: and there's this advantage that the governments have in manipulating
Speaker 1: their populations, and that's not a good setup. All that
Speaker 1: Facebook has told me so far is that they are
Speaker 1: focused on making sure that the governments know that they
Speaker 1: have to adhere to Facebook's community standards. So they're not
Speaker 1: stopping this kind of training that they do or getting
Speaker 1: governments up to speed on how best to use the tools.
Speaker 1: They think of government's kind of like they think of
Speaker 1: sports stars or celebrities just people that everyone wants to
Speaker 1: follow on Facebook, so why not give them v I
Speaker 1: P Attention? So but at the same time, it sounds
Speaker 1: like they're stopping short of being um like very explicit
Speaker 1: about new measures that they would introduce to make sure
Speaker 1: that governments aren't breaking the rules. I mean, as a
Speaker 1: contrast to the way they've they've really started talking about
Speaker 1: measures they're taking to crack down on things like fake
Speaker 1: news and hate speech. Well, the government's control what is
Speaker 1: very important to Facebook, which is access to Facebook. So
Speaker 1: you know, they want to make sure when Oshana introduced
Speaker 1: Facebook to the country for the first time, they also
Speaker 1: wanted to meet with the telecom regulators. They wanted to
Speaker 1: meet with, you know, the sort of the people that
Speaker 1: would be in control of the business relationship as well.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's you know, those are the
Speaker 1: incentives that Facebook operates on, and they're trying to make
Speaker 1: sure that they clean up their procedures and policies and
Speaker 1: improved training and investment. But there are some fundamental ways
Speaker 1: that the platform works with the government that maybe the
Speaker 1: government will always have this advantage. Yeah, so it sounds
Speaker 1: like Facebook is still racing to catch up with the
Speaker 1: reality that helped create. I would say that's true. And
Speaker 1: that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do
Speaker 1: you have a story about Facebook in your country, We
Speaker 1: want to hear from you. You can email us at
Speaker 1: decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Sarah Fryer and I'm at Pia gad Cary. If you're
Speaker 1: a fan of the show, please take a moment to
Speaker 1: rate and review us. It really helps new listeners find
Speaker 1: the show. This episode was produced by Pierre Goodcary and
Speaker 1: Liz Smith. Our story editor was Anne Vandermain. Thanks also
Speaker 1: to Austin Weinstein, Brad Stone, Akido, Emily Busso, and Magnus Hendrickson.
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you
Speaker 1: next week.