Facebook Whistleblower Fears Election Abuse

by Jon Swartz on August 27, 2024

Frances Haugen, who famously blew the whistle on Facebook and its susceptibility to manipulation, has renewed concerns over the social-networking company. This time, she’s laser-focused on misinformation during the 2024 presidential election.

“We are in a new, very nebulous era where we need to think more holistically and creatively” in defending cyberdefenses, Haugen said in an interview Tuesday at the Data Grail Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

“The problem is not your whacky uncle with the strange ideas,” she said. “AI lets people actively amplify and multiply misinformation and decisive issues. AI accelerates the ability to run really efficient influence operations.”

Haugen, who worked at then-Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google before that, lifted the lid on Facebook’s “Civic Integrity” program designed to curb misinformation and other threats to election security. She also exposed the company’s impacts on youth, its feeble response to human trafficking and drug cartels, and vaccine misinformation in a document dump in 2021. [A disillusioned Haugen left Facebook in 2021 after the company dissolved its civic integrity team after the 2020 U.S. elections.]

Now, she’s sounding the alarm around a number of disturbing developments: The Aug. 14 shuttering of CrowdTangle, Meta’s public insights tool to explore public content on social media; the lingering effects of thousands of companywide layoffs that severely limited its content moderation and privacy teams; and the growing influence of so-called adversarial AI that can deceive and trick models.

“Things have gotten a whole lot more difficult,” Haugen said.

With 10 weeks to go before the presidential election, the oversight of social media has gotten a lot weirder with AI-powered ransomware attacks, deepfakes, and the antics of billionaires like X owner Elon Musk and Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov.

Fresh off the recent theft of data from the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers, and on the heels of a Telegram-based bot service called “IntelFetch” that aggregated compromised credentials associated with the Democratic National Convention and Democratic Party websites, security experts are increasingly antsy about the Nov. 5 general election.

“I am concerned about very little awareness around election security, and the lack of resources dedicated to defending the process,” Debbie Gordon, chief executive and founder of Cloud Range, said in an interview.

“A lot of people — election officials, IT experts — are reactive rather than proactive,” she said. “Denial-of-service attacks could hit a candidates’ website in terms of fundraising and getting out a message.”

For example, voter data at one of the largest state counties in Illinois, St. Clair County, was recently exposed. The county clerk’s office leaked 470,000 sensitive documents used to verify voter registration lists, Cybernews reported. The tranche of documents was hosted on an Amazon S3 bucket owned by the St. Clair Clerk’s office.

On Tuesday, Abu Quereshi, a former Canadian government threat intelligence analyst and who is now threat intelligence lead for predictive cyber company, BforeAI, noted an escalation of election misinformation — most of it negative, some of it supportive — and the trolling of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald J. Trump. A major theme was, “Why you should not vote for this person,” he said.

A couple hundred websites were created attempting to suppress voter turnout by providing misinformation about voting dates, locations and requirements for state and local races, as well as fraudsters were found to be creating digital currencies branded with election-related themes and promising unrealistic returns to investors, according to the company’s “2024 US ElectionsInfrastructure Attack Report.”

August 27, 2024August 27, 2024 Jon Swartz amazon, Cybersecurity, Elections, facebook, Meta, Telegram

Jon Swartz

Jon Swartz is senior content writer at Techstrong Group. Most recently, he was MarketWatch’s senior reporter based in San Francisco covering technology and Silicon Valley. Previously, Swartz was USA Today’s San Francisco bureau chief. He has also written for Forbes, The (London) Independent, London Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Orleans Times-Picayune. He has won numerous journalism awards and is a two-time finalist for the Loebs, the Pulitzers of business reporting. Additionally, he frequently appears as a panelist on Fox Business and NBC Bay Area’s Press:Here program. He has been nominated four times for the Pulitzer Prize. Swartz is co-author of “Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity” and sole author of “Young Wealth.”

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