Still Lots of 'Guesswork' After Facebook's Account Purge
*By Alex Heath*
Questions still linger over who was behind the coordinated misinformation campaign on Facebook ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
“Facebook does not want to make an attribution yet,” Kevin Roose of The New York Times told Cheddar on Wednesday. “They have not definitively said this is Russia or this isn’t Russia.”
On Tuesday, Facebook disclosed that it had removed 32 accounts and pages that were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The accounts organized real-world events around hot-button issues, like a sequel to last year’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the pages, called "Resisters,” created a Facebook event for a protest in Washington that was scheduled to take place next week.
“Facebook is clearly taking the threat of foreign-led disinformation campaigns very seriously,” Theresa Payton, former White House CIO under President George W. Bush, told Cheddar on Wednesday. “Russian operatives and other operatives around the globe that want to meddle in elections have been changing their tactics to learn how to hide in plain site. This is just a drill, what’s going on going into the midterm elections.”
Facebook says that it’s in the early stage of investigating who is behind the coordinated effort. The social network recently began notifying members of the Justice Department and says it has been working with the FBI to investigate the activity.
Meanwhile, Facebook continues to deal with the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed the data of millions of Facebook users. The company said on Tuesday that it had cut off access to “hundreds of thousands of inactive apps that have not submitted for our app review process.”
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-still-unsure-whos-behind-latest-political-influence-campaign).
Amid a backdrop of ongoing tariff uncertainty, more and more gamers are facing price hikes. Microsoft raised recommended retailer pricing for its Xbox consoles and controllers around the world this week. Its Xbox Series S, for example, now starts at $379.99 in the U.S. — up $80 from the $299.99 price tag that debuted in 2020. And its more powerful Xbox Series X will be $599.99 going forward, a $100 jump from its previous $499.99 listing. The tech giant didn’t mention tariffs specifically, but cited wider “market conditions and the rising cost of development.” Beyond the U.S., Microsoft also laid out Xbox price adjustments for Europe, the U.K. and Australia. The company said all other countries would also receive updates locally.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday that the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the current fiscal quarter will be sourced from India, while iPads and other devices will come from Vietnam as the company works to avoid the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on its business. Apple’s earnings for the first three months of the year topped Wall Street’s expectations thanks to high demand for its iPhones, and the company said tariffs had a limited effect on the fiscal second quarter’s results. Cook added that for the current quarter, assuming things don’t change, Apple expects to see $900 million added to its costs as a result of the tariffs.
Visa is hoping to hand your credit card to an artificial intelligence “agent” that can find and buy clothes, groceries, airplane tickets and other items on your behalf.
Shares of Deliveroo, the food delivery service based in London, are hitting three-year highs on Monday after it received a $3.6 billion proposed takeover offer from DoorDash.
X, the social media platform owned by Trump adviser Elon Musk, is challenging the constitutionality of a Minnesota ban on using deepfakes to influence elections and harm candidates.
The State Bar of California has disclosed that some multiple-choice questions in a problem-plagued bar exam were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence.
