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'No evidence' of interference in Brexit vote: Facebook

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 25 Jun 2019

There is "absolutely no evidence" that outside forces such as Russia influenced the 2016 UK Brexit result, using Facebook.

This was the word from Sir Nick Clegg, Facebook head of global affairs and communications, speaking to the BBC in an interview this week.

Facebook has long been facing calls for regulation from the US Congress and British privacy regulators after reports last year revealed political data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of millions of people's Facebook profiles without their consent, and used the information to influence voters to leave the European Union.

Cambridge Analytica, which has since closed down, had a reputation among political operatives for exaggerating its role in campaigns.

The data analytics firm was also under fire for harvesting private information from more than 50 million Facebook users in developing techniques to support president Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.

Facebook was later fined 500 000 pounds by the UK's data protection watchdog for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

In a statement released by Facebook at the time, in efforts to appeal the fine, the social media giant said the Information Commissioner Office’s (ICO’s) own investigation had “found no evidence” that UK users' data was used in political campaigns.

Clegg, former deputy prime minister of UK, who joined the tech giant last October following his ousting as a Liberal Democrats MP, told the BBC that Facebook had run two full analyses of its data held in the run-up to the 2016 referendum and found no evidence that its platform played a significant role to influence Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

Opponents of Brexit had repeatedly questioned whether Russia played a role in the vote by promoting stories online on issues such as immigration in a bid to sway opinion.

Russia repeatedly denied any involvement.

It was discovered that nearly 1 500 people of the 300 000 who downloaded an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" created by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan in 2013, opted to also share their personal messages with the app.

The ICO report said Kogan, and his company GSR, used a personality app to gain access to the data not only of the 300 000 people who installed it, but also all their Facebook friends, without their permission.

Some of these personal messages, including user data, was shared with Cambridge Analytica, which used it to help target political adverts in the US and UK.

It was estimated up to 87 million Facebook users had their data leaked by proxy of the 300 000 people who downloaded the app.

Almost 60 000 South African Facebook users were also impacted by the social network's data leak.

Social media regulation

In the interview, Clegg welcomed calls for Facebook and other social media platforms to be more closely regulated by governments.

He said there was a "pressing need" for new "rules of the road" on privacy, election rules, the use of people's data and adjudicating on what constitutes hate speech.

Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users worldwide, with 139 million in Africa, has stepped up efforts to combat the spread of misinformation and election interference, shutting down hundreds of accounts run by organisations attempting to influence politics across the globe.

The social media giant recently removed 265 Facebook and Instagram accounts, Facebook pages, groups and events, which it says "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour" from Israeli organisations.

It is also working on appointing an independent global oversight board, which will have the authority to review the social network's content decisions.

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