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Tackling this insidious form of election interference should be a top priority for Facebook, election experts say.

“The 2016 elections did not feature a problem with candidate ads. The problems were coming from foreign interference in American elections,” UC Irvine law professor and election expert Rick Hasen said. “To say they are not going to target that now indicates they are far from coming up with solutions to the main problem.” 

Before SCL had dealings in St. Kitts and Nevis, in 2009 the company worked on a major referendum campaign on the Caribbean islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to defeat an attempt to establish a new constitution to replace the one that had been enacted when the country became independent from British rule in 1979. Had the new referendum passed, it would have installed a number of new (often odious) provisions, including rules that opened elections to dual citizens and that legal marriage could only exist between a man and a woman. The referendum also would have ended Queen Elizabeth II’s symbolic reign over the Caribbean country, but the measure failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed—thanks, at least in part, to help from SCL Group, according to accusations at the time from Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who in 2010 said the campaign to defeat the referendum had hired SCL to run a smear campaign against him. 

Gonsalves further claimed that his rival James Mitchell—the founder of the country’s National Democratic Party and a former prime minister—held an advisory role on SCL’s board, an allegation Mitchell didn’t deny when asked by a reporter from the Guyana Chronicle. Mitchell is also listed as a member of SCL’s advisory board in a Bloomberg profile. Later in 2011, in presentation materials seen by the Times of London, SCL admitted it worked against Gonsalves with a “targeted digital attack,” meaning that “within three weeks every single reference to him on the first two pages of Google … referred to the candidate’s horrific track record of corruption, coercion, rape allegations and victimisation,” the presentation read.

In the document, Global Science Research, Mr Kogan’s company, outlined terms and conditions that asked users for permission to collect information, including their likes and status updates as well as similar data from their Facebook friends. The terms stated the company would have the right to “edit, copy, disseminate, publish, transfer, append or merge with other databases, sell, license . . . and archive your contribution and data”.

But some critics questioned what effect the move would have in a site that counts selling access to its users’ information as its biggest moneymaker. Facebook, privacy experts said, nets a vast range of real-time information — friendships, photos, work histories, interests and consumer tastes, as well as mobile, location and facial-recognition data — that advertisers view as more current and accurate than the broker information inferred from old receipts and government logs. What, they ask, would advertisers need to pay data brokers for?

“We don’t know enough about Facebook’s data trove to know whether their abandonment of Partner Categories helps users avoid privacy invasions,” said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland professor who specializes in algorithms and privacy. “Even if we did have that knowledge, we have little reason to trust Facebook to actually follow through on it. It may well change course once media attention has gone elsewhere.”

“There’s something so striking about a meme that says, ‘bae come over,’ and it’s a photo of a train,” said Marty, now a junior and one of the group’s lead administrators alongside Eldred and Orenstein. “It’s this weird juxtaposition of the nerdy world of subway models and zoning laws, plus that internet humor.”

First and foremost, Battle Royale designed to be a blank slate for vivid personal stories. Once inside the game, it’s easy to be swept up in the travails and adventures of your avatar.

Every time that bus cruises over the island, a hundred narratives unfold. Some of them are as forgettable as “I opened the door to a house and someone blew me apart with a shotgun.” Others are more textured. When I achieved my first Victory Royale, I couldn’t stop myself from recounting the whole story to my entire family.

It has all that chaos and randomness of the regular Instagram news feed algorithm, except now it’s difficult to tell what the images are of because they’re in ASCII. Win, win!

 While there may be a policy solution, there could also be various technical ones. In particular, Facebook could design its systems so it didn’t manage all our data by default. Instead, user data could be stored inaccessible to Facebook until users gave the service explicit permission to tap into it. Users could still see ads, keeping Facebook’s business model intact.

When Facebook was founded, “there was only one data model that worked: Facebook knew everything you did,” Bill Raduchel, a well-known Silicon Valley investor and adviser, told me this week. “Nothing else was possible. However, we are now 15 years later, and computer science has moved on both in hardware and software. You can now recreate all the functionality of Facebook where the social network has zero knowledge of your activities, but it can still have most of its business model.”

Just last week, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane depicted a woman pushed to the brink of madness, into an asylum, desperate for just a few moments on her cellphone, to return to the tranquility of her lonely life of dating-app sadness and banal texting. 2016’s Nerve turned social media stunting into a life-and-death game show. This summer’s forthcoming Eighth Grade spotlights a socially awkward teenage girl’s dual life as an aspirant motivational YouTube star and Instagram tourist. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. Last year’s ill-conceived The Circle was at least premonitory in its vision of a future tracked and targeted by a cheery, globe-conquering technology company and all of its extensions into our daily lives. The Emoji Movie was, literally, shit. But it was also a corporately synergized movie spun directly from your phone. This fall, Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 will be a kid’s play on Ready Player One, in which the titular character escapes a video game and heads straight into the depths of internet culture writ large. Maybe he’ll come out the other side as a blogger.

The tweet gained about 1,600 likes in its first week, with 100-plus responses, including one from the official Dyson Twitter account. (Is any brand capable of passing up an opportunity for self-promotion?) It’s now been covered by outlets like Fox News, The Today Show, the New York Post, Lifehacker, Allure, USA Today, Bustle, and The Kitchn. The Root declared it “the Whitest Thing on the Internet” in 2018, three months into the year. Rosner’s own New Yorker article about the hack was turned into a YouTube video by the content farm EnterTV, which interspersed Rosner’s writing with stock images of chicken and set it all to a Latin soundtrack.