For months beginning up to the vote, Obama and his top aides simply struggled over how to react to Russia’s brazen invasion on behalf of the Donald Trump operations without playing matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides saw back with pain and ordered they had done more.
Now nestled in a private room on the sidelines of a conference of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a special appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation severely. Unless Facebook and the government did further to address the threat, Obama urged, it would only get severe in the next official race.
Zuckerberg recognized the burden posed by fake news. But he told Obama those directions weren’t popular on Facebook and that there was no easy solution, according to people prepared on the exchange, who spoke on the provision of anonymity to share forces of a private conversation.
The conference on Nov. 19 was a flashpoint in a turbulent year in which Zuckerberg came to understand the magnitude of a new threat a coordinated attack on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that used the social network he created.
Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn’t anticipate the wave of disinformation that was growing and the political influence that followed. The organization then closed with a series of hard choices created to shore up its own rules without touching on free speech for its users around the world.
One result of those efforts was Zuckerberg’s testimony on Thursday that Facebook had really been manipulated and that the organization would now turn over to Congress further than 3,000 politically themed ads that were bought by assumed Russian operatives.
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