Technology

Alex Stamos, Facebook chief security officer since 2015, announced that he is leaving the company to take a position at Stanford University. The company has been shedding leadership over the last half a year largely owing to fallout from its response, or lack thereof, to the ongoing troubles relating to user data security and election interference on the social network.

&While I have greatly enjoyed this work, the time has come for me to move on from my position as Chief Security Officer at Facebook,& he wrote in a public Facebook post. &Starting in September, I will join Stanford University full-time as a teacher and researcher.&

Rumors that Stamos was not long for the company spread in March; he was said to have disagreed considerably with the tack Facebook had taken in disclosure and investigation of its role in hosting state-sponsored disinformation seeded by Russian intelligence. To be specific, he is said to have preferred more and better disclosures rather than the slow drip-feed of half-apologies, walkbacks and admissions we&ve gotten from the company over the last year or so.

He said at in March that &despite the rumors, I&m still fully engaged with my work at Facebook,& though he acknowledged that his role now focused on &emerging security risks and working on election security.&

Funnily enough, that is exactly the topic he will be looking into at Stanford as a new adjunct professor, where he will be joining a new group called Information Warfare, The New York Times reported.

&This fall, I am very excited to launch a course teaching hands-on offensive and defensive techniques and to contribute to the new cybersecurity masterspecialty at [the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies],& Stamos wrote.

Leaving because of a major policy disagreement with his employer would not be out of character for Stamos. He reportedly left Yahoo (which of course was absorbed into Aol to form TechCrunchparent company, Oath) because of the companychoice to allow U.S. intelligence access to certain user data. One may imagine a similar gulf in understanding between him and others at Facebook, especially on something as powerfully divisive as this election interference story or the Cambridge Analytica troubles.

&My last day at Facebook will be August 17th,& he wrote, &and while I will no longer have the pleasure of working side by side with my friends there, I am encouraged that there are so many dedicated, thoughtful and skilled people continuing to tackle these challenges. It is critical that we as an industry live up to our collective responsibility to consider the impact of what we build, and I look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with the security and safety teams at Facebook.&

Stamos is far from the only Facebook official to leave recently; Colin Stretch, chief legal officer, announced his departure last month after more than eight years at the company; its similarly long-serving head of policy and comms, Elliot Schrage, left the month before; WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum left that company in April.

Facebook directed me to Stamospost when asked for comment; we have asked Stamos for more information directly and will update if we hear back.

You can no longer automatically cross-post your tweets to Facebook . Twitter announced today that functionality is now coming to an end, and users will instead have to copy a tweetURL if they want to share a tweet to Facebook going forward. In a statement, the company attributed the change to a recent Facebook update.

Specifically, the issue has to do with Facebooklockdown of its API platform — an overhaul thatbeen underway following the Cambridge Analytica scandal,where as many as 87 million Facebook users had their data improperly harvested and shared.

Since then, Facebook has been plugging holes in its API platform to prevent future data misuse. One of those changes involves Facebook Login, announced back in April. The company said that apps that had been granted permission to publish posts to Facebook as the logged-in user would no longer have that permission. New apps wouldn&t be able use this feature the day the change was announced. And in the case of older apps, the permission would be revoked on August 1, 2018 — thattoday.

Facebook also said developers who were previously using the API could instead turn to FacebookShare dialogsforweb,iOSandAndroid. But Twitterstatement didn&t mention there would be an alternative means of sharing built back into Twitter, beyond using its existing &Copy link to Tweet& feature. This is a manual way of sharing tweets, of course, and not a replacement for what is being lost.

The option to set up Facebook sharing hasn&t completelydisappeared from Twitterapp as of yet.

Facebook still appears within the &Apps& section via the web, with the button &Login to Facebook& seemingly waiting to be clicked. However, this option will no longer work as of today. Instead, it returns the error: &Facebook reported an error. The error has been reported to our engineering team. Please try again as it might be a temporary problem.&

It doesn&t seem like Twitter users looking for other workarounds will have much success either, given this situation. Other apps, like IFTTT, for example, are throwing errors as of today, too.

A number of activists and organizers in the Washington, DC area are disputing Facebook decision to remove a counter-protestevent for a rally organized by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist figure who planned the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Facebook removed the event, &No Unite the Right 2-DC,& after discovering that one account connected to the event exhibited what Facebook calls &coordinated inauthentic behavior.& The company defines this activity as &people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they&re doing.&

The Facebook page at the center of the controversy was called &Resisters.& TechCrunch confirmed that the Resisters page was created by &bad actors,& as defined by the company, who coordinated fake accounts to deceive users. Facebook ultimately removed the No Unite the Right 2-DC event due to its known interaction and engagement with the Resisters page and maintains that Resisters was an illegitimate page from its inception.

As the company explained in its blog post:

The &Resisters& Page also created a Facebook Event for a protest on August 10 to 12 and enlisted support from real people… Inauthentic admins of the &Resisters& Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event.

The company also observed that a known Internet Research Agency (IRA) account joined the counter-protest event as an admin, though it only served as an admin for seven minutes. (The IRA has been assessed by the U.S. intelligence community as a content farm likely funded by a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.) On top of that, Facebook noted that an IRA account the company was aware of shared a Facebook event hosted by Resisters in 2017.

Herewhere things get even more tricky. The event that Facebook deleted had been taken over by a handful ofreal DC area activist groups.These groups, including Smash Racism DC, Black Lives Matter DC, Black Lives Matter Charlottesvilleand other local groups, worked together under the coalition name &Shut It Down DC& and their actions and plans were not inspired by the &No Unite the Right 2& event, they just happened to cross paths. (Since then, the coalition has recreated the Facebook event as &Hate Not Welcome: No Unite The Right 2.&)

TechCrunch spoke with a handful of DC-based organizers, including Andrew Batcher, a Washington, DC-based activist involved with Shut It Down DC, to clarify how the local coalition of organizers became connected to an event and an account deemed illegitimate by Facebook.

&It was grassroots organizing from a lot of different groups who were interested in this,& Batcher said. &A lot of groups went down to Charlottesville last year. Charlottesville is only two hours south of DC.&

He explains that the groupimpetus was Kesslerown event, not a Facebook event that organizers stumbled onto.

&When we started organizing we talked about making a Facebook page and saw that this already existed,& Batcher said. &It happens pretty regularly in DC knowing how many major events take a place here.&

&We asked to be made co-hosts of the event and we put our stuff up on it basically,& Batcher said. That included video calls to action, photos and other content, including the event description. &Everything that was taken down was ours.&

Beyond creating the initial placeholder page, Batcher says that the Resisters page had &absolutely no involvement& in the event. &This is really outrageous for us,& Batcher said. &[It] makes it look like we&re Russian pawns. We know that we&re not, and we know that we&ve been doing this organizing.&

He and other activists on the left have expressed concerns that this depiction could undermine their efforts in the mainstream and even lead to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate that spill over into real life violence.

Facebook says that it reached out to the legitimate organizers of No Unite The Right 2-DC with the following message:

We haven&t been able to connect on the phone yet, but I did want to make sure you know that earlier today we removed a Facebook event that you are listed as a co-host of, &No Unite the Right 2 & DC&, because one the Pages that created the event, &Resisters&, has been removed from Facebook because [it] was created by someone establishing an inauthentic account that has been associated with coordinated inauthentic behavior.

I understand this may be surprising or frustrating. We are reaching out to make sure you have the relevant information and understand that this has nothing to do with you or your Page. Later today, we&ll begin providing information about the event deletion to the approximately 2,600 users who indicated their interest in the event, and the 600 plus users that said they&d attend. If you are interested in setting up another event, we would be happy to include details about it in our public communications.

According to Batcher, most of the eventorganizers with Shut It Down DC did not receive any correspondence and others received an email &two lines long,& which he provided.

The group is dismayed that Facebook went ahead and removed the event before making contact with more of its organizers. In interviews with TechCrunch, he and other organizers expressed a deep distrust of Facebook and a desire to see more evidence from the company that supports its recent actions. One organizer connected to the DC groups expressed concern that Facebook might be flagging activists working together using VPNs for suspicious coordinated activity. When asked about that concern, Facebook explained that VPN use and common privacy measures would not be sufficient, by Facebookstandards, to cause an account or page to be removed.

&If there was an account that did something bad, get rid of that account. It doesn&t seem to me like it would have to spread to all of this legitimate organizing,& Batcher said. &What we would like is a public apology and them letting people know that we are real people doing real organizing.& He added that Facebook did not show consideration for the potential damage to the people who organized the event together in real life.

That distrust is reflected on both sides of the political spectrum. Concerns that Facebook is censoring content made by right-wing figures have bubbled up in congressional hearings and been floated among many users on the right, though there is little evidence supporting recent claims. On the left, the company has a checkered history of sometimes unwitting censorship in incidents that have affected everyone fromBlack Lives Matter supportersto parts of theLGBTQ community.In some of those cases, Facebook users wereabusing the platformreporting toolsfor targeted harassment, but the company was slow to address concerns or to change its policy.

Facebook has also dragged its feet in confronting openly abusive, racist content on its platform and recently faced criticism for internal policies that allow white nationalism while forbidding white supremacism, drawing what is widely considered to be an artificial distinction between the two. These woes don&t just affect Facebook, but the platform does appear to be a perfect storm for anyone acting in bad faith.

While the counter-protest organizers have since created a new Facebook event and intend to continue their efforts, the situation is a fairly unsettling cautionary tale of a rising form of manipulation on the worldbiggest social platform. Recent revelations and those from 2017 show that a new breed of &blended& social media influence campaign — fake accounts leveraging the efforts of real, regular people — proves particularly insidious.

So-called &bad actors& are infiltrating legitimate causes, creating chaos and throwing everything into question. Even when these efforts are exposed, ita winning formula for anyone seeking to sow further discord and doubt in the U.S. political landscape. For everyone else, the odds aren&t looking good.