Facebook’s former CSO says that the US must ‘come together to protect’ democracy from misinformation

Alex Stamos, who recently stepped down from his role as Chief Security Officer at Facebook, published an op-ed in The Washington Post today, saying that Facebook could have responded Russian interference on its platform earlier.

Stamos opens with confirmation of one of the details in the recent New York Times report about how the social media company slowly dealt with Russia-linked activity that she yelled at him after he had told Facebooks board of directors that his team was still working to uncover the extent of misinformation on the platform, and that she later apologized.

But he notes that theres plenty of blame to go around: the issues that Facebook faced around Russian cyberwarfare were ones that also stymied the US Intelligence community and that the US government didnt do much to help afterwards. He also notes that major media outlets played into the goals of online disinformation campaigns with their reporting amplifying the misinformation, and says that tech companies simply arent equipped to understand geopolitical threats.

Earlier this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company will do more to change how it delivers content to users, trying to deemphasize sensational content and misinformation, in the hopes that that will discourage people from posting it in the first place.