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Welcome! Follow the cyber team, Olivia Beavers (@olivia_beavers) and Maggie Miller (@magmill95), and the tech team, Harper Neidig (@hneidig) and Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e).
FACEBOOK CLAPS BACK: A Facebook representative on Tuesday defended the company’s decision to not take down a video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that was meant to make her appear drunk, saying flagging the video and not removing it promoted user choice.
Neil Potts, Facebook’s public policy manager, said taking that approach allows people to understand what the video is and why it has been flagged.
“It is our policy to inform people when we have information that might be false on the platform so they can make their own decisions about that content,” Potts said during a meeting of the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy, and Democracy in Ottawa, Canada.{mosads}
The grand committee includes politicians from a dozen countries who meet with representatives of Facebook and other tech companies to discuss how to protect privacy and prevent abuse on social media.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are grappling with how to handle fake and manipulated videos after the Pelosi video racked up millions of views and raised the debate in the United States. Experts are warning that manipulated videos will be a new frontier for social media companies and people running for office in 2020.
The remarks from Potts underline Facebook’s view that the videos ultimately come down to a form of free expression, and that those seeing the videos on social media simply need to be told of their full context.
The Pelosi video was slowed down to make the Speaker appear to be slurring her words.
While it did not take down the video, Facebook said it had been flagged by company fact checkers as “false,” and that as a result Facebook was “heavily reducing its distribution in News Feed and showing additional context from this fact-checker,” such as related articles.
But in Ottawa and Washington, some said that was not enough.
ICYMI over the weekend… All eyes on fake Pelosi video: A fake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) posted to Facebook on Thursday that was edited to make her appear drunk is underscoring a quickly evolving danger for 2020 campaigns.
One cycle after Russia’s interference in the election through hacks and fake posts on social media wreaked havoc, presidential candidates now have to worry about videos doctored by artificial intelligence technologies that can make candidates say things they didn’t say or look completely different.
The video of Pelosi posted to Facebook didn’t use such advanced technologies.
It was slowed down to make Pelosi appear unwell or potentially drunk, and it still succeeded in fooling many people — at least judged by comment boards.
The video had been viewed more than 2.5 million times as of Friday afternoon. Facebook is refusing to remove the clip, saying it doesn’t violate platform guidelines, though it is not recommending the video in its news feed.
President Trump waded into the controversy, tweeting a clip from Fox Business Network that compiled every time Pelosi stumbled over her words during a recent press conference. The clip included a Fox News commentator saying Pelosi appeared “worn down.”
Coupled with remarks by Trump, it at least appeared the president was trying to use the fake video to his advantage to build a narrative that the Speaker “had lost it,” in Trump’s words. But Trump denied knowing about the fake video.
The fake Pelosi video points to a danger that experts have increasingly been warning about. Fabrice Pothier, a senior advisor for the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, said foreign actors could use fake videos “to sow distrust and decredibilise their opponents.”
Pothier said the Pelosi video is essentially a cheap one, and more advanced fakes are coming.
And there’s more on today’s hearing in Canada…
BAD LUCK FOR ZUCK? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be held in contempt of Canadian Parliament if he keeps ignoring requests from lawmakers in that country to testify before their government, Canadian Conservative Member of Parliament Bob Zimmer said Tuesday.
Canadian lawmakers voted Tuesday to issue an open-ended summons for Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Financial Officer Sheryl Sandberg, meaning the two will face a summons to appear before the Parliament the next time they set foot in Canada. If the executives fail to abide by those summons, Canadian lawmakers would vote on a motion to hold them in contempt of Parliament, Zimmer said.
If approved, that motion could result in jail time for the powerful executives, though it is unlikely it would play out that way.
“It’s only fitting that there’s an ongoing summons, so as soon as they step foot into our country they will be served and expected to [sit in front of] our committee,” said Zimmer, chairman of the Canadian House of Commons committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
How we got here: Zimmer made the announcement after Zuckerberg and Sandberg flouted a subpoena to appear before the committee during a hearing about privacy, misinformation and hate speech attended by lawmakers from around the globe.
Throughout the testy event, lawmakers expressed outrage at the executives for failing to comply with the subpoena, instead opting to send Facebook’s head of public policy in Canada Kevin Chan and its director of public policy Neil Potts.
Jo Stevens, a U.K. member of Parliament, said at the hearing that members of the committee had crossed oceans to make it more convenient for Zuckerberg to testify. Potts said he and Chan have been tasked with representing the company.
The international hearing included representatives from countries including Ireland, Singapore, the United Kingdom and more.
IRANIAN MISINFORMATION: Facebook and Twitter said Tuesday that they are working to kneecap an escalating Iran-linked online campaign that was spreading misinformation in the U.S. since months before the 2018 midterms.
In a blog post, Facebook said it removed 51 Facebook accounts, 36 Pages, seven Groups and three Instagram accounts that originated in Iran and have engaged in “coordinated” inauthentic behavior. The pages had amassed about 21,000 followers by the time they were taken down.
Facebook said the individuals behind the activity were pretending to be located in the U.S. and Europe, and at various points misrepresented themselves as journalists or news outlets in order to gain influence and amplify their messages bolstering Iran’s political agenda.
Twitter said it removed the network of 2,800 inauthentic accounts originating in Iran at the beginning of May.
“Our investigations into these accounts are ongoing,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill. “As we continue to investigate potential wider networks and actors, we typically avoid making any declarative public statements until we can be sure that we have reached the end of our analyses.”
Both of the company’s announcements came on the heels of a report from top cybersecurity firm FireEye, which on Wednesday published its report on an Iran-linked misinformation campaign it had identified on Facebook and Twitter.
FireEye has been investigating a network of English-language social media accounts working to promote messages supporting “Iranian political interests” – mostly anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian and anti-Saudi sentiments. FireEye found that some of the accounts were impersonating real Americans, including some Republican political candidates who ran for the House in 2018, while others represented themselves as journalists. Some of the accounts successfully had letters and articles published in top publications such as the Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News.
According to FireEye, most of the accounts they’d been tracking over the past year were suspended around May 9.
Read more on the misinformation campaign here.
NETFLIX BECOMES NETFIGHTS: Netflix says it’ll work with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to “fight” against Georgia’s so-called heartbeat abortion law.
“We have many women working on productions in Georgia, whose rights, along with millions of others, will be severely restricted by this law,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in a statement Tuesday first reported by Variety. “It’s why we will work with the ACLU and others to fight it in court.”
The legislation, signed by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) earlier this month, bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is sometimes as early as six weeks.
Several actors and production companies have since threatened to pull their projects that are based in the Peach State in protest of the abortion bill, which is poised to take effect in January.
“We thank Netflix for offering to support our upcoming lawsuit against Georgia’s unconstitutional abortion ban,” Talcott Camp, deputy director with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement to The Hill. “The moment is now — no one can sit on the sidelines while our reproductive rights are under attack.”
Multiple Netflix productions are currently filming in Georgia, according to the state’s department of economic development, including the Emma Roberts feature film “Holidate” and the third season of the drama series “Ozark,” among others.
What this could mean: In his statement, Sarandos also said the media giant would “rethink” its slate of productions in Georgia if the law goes into effect.
HEALTH ORG SAYS YOUR PARENTS ARE RIGHT ABOUT VIDEO GAMES: Addiction to video games is now considered a mental health disorder by a leading international body.
The World Health Organization (WHO) added video game addiction to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in an update Saturday, according to NBC News.
The classification refers to “gaming disorder” as “a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior” that becomes so extensive it “takes precedence over other life interests.” The move comes less than a year after WHO added gaming addiction to its list of potentially harmful technology-related behaviors.
Shekhar Saxena, the WHO’s expert on mental health and substance abuse, told NBC News that the disorder is rare and is only diagnosed following months of extended playing.
Pushback: A lobbying group for the video game industry pushed back on the new classification, saying video games are “enjoyed safely and sensibly by more than 2 billion people worldwide” and noting that the “educational, therapeutic, and recreational value” of games is widely recognized.
SLEEP WELL TONIGHT: A key component of malware used by hackers to disrupt U.S. cities, paralyzing local governments and frustrating residents, was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), The New York Times reported.
The NSA reportedly lost control of the tool, called EternalBlue, in 2017.
After that, it was used across the globe by hackers in Russia, China and North Korea, according to the Times, which added that it has affected hospitals, airports, shipping operators, ATMs and factories.
More recently, it has been used against a number of U.S. cities, including the recent high-profile ransomware attack on Baltimore in which computers were frozen and water bills, health alerts, real estate sales and other services were disrupted, the newspaper reports.
On May 7, city workers’ screens suddenly locked and a message demanded $100,000 to free the city’s files. Baltimore has not paid and almost three weeks later remains affected.
According to the Times, damage from these attacks would be less vast without EternalBlue.
TWITTER THREAD OF THE DAY: How one guy tracked down the personal data companies have on him.
AN OP-ED TO CHEW ON: Three reasons you should pay attention to the OECD artificial intelligence principles.
A LIGHTER CLICK: When your parents ask how far ahead you’ve planned your future.
NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:
Colorado students secretly photographed for government-led facial recognition research. (The Denver Post)
An in depth look at Huawei’s rise over the years and the multiple allegations lobbed against it. (The Wall Streete Journal)
Google’s shadow work force: temps who outnumber full-time employees. (The New York Times)
Amazon is poised to unleash a long-feared purge of small suppliers. (Bloomberg News)