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).
Catching you up on what you missed in today's news. Elon Musk has increased his commitment to purchase Twitter to $33.5 billion, Apple is raising its hourly wages for retail stores to compete for talent, and Roblox has announced that it will be partnering with the medically prescribed video game ‘Endeavor’ to help treat patients with ADHD.
After learning that the suspect in the Uvalde school shooting posted about his intentions on Facebook, activists are urging social networks to make changes. Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist and author of "The Facebook Narcissist," joined Cheddar News to discuss the role social media plays in school shootings. "They're not really invested in taking down hateful content," she said about social platforms."In regards to the shooting, it was 15 minutes before that actual threat. It would be pretty hard for a social media company to trace that threat that quickly. But what they can do better is take down threats and hateful content much faster and more than they're doing now."
Esper Bionics CEO Dima Gazda breaks down how they're creating a mind-controlled bionic hand that guest smarter the more you use it, and what this innovation means for the future of the prosthetics industry.
On this episode of Cheddar Innovates: Brightseed Co-Founder breaks down what plant bioactives are, and how they're using the latest technology to study human's biological connections with plants; Esper Bionics CEO breaks down how they re creating a mind-controlled bionic hand that guest smarter the more you use it; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'Capturing A Black Hole In Our Milky Way.'
The crypto industry is still reeling from Terra's recent crash. The company's blockchain was temporarily halted earlier this month after the collapse of its cryptocurrency Luna (LUNA) and its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), which led to almost $45 billion being wiped from the tokens' market caps within a week. Now, many are left wondering what Terra's struggles mean for the broader crypto market. Reeve Collins, CEO of the NFT platform BLOCKv, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell from Davos 2022 to discuss.
China's largest ride-hailing company will no longer be listed on the world's largest stock exchange. Didi shareholders voted on Monday to delist from the New York Stock Exchange, less than a year after launching a $4.4 billion IPO with the most significant U.S. share offering by a Chinese company since Alibaba debuted in 2014. Since going public in June of last year, around $70 billion has been wiped from Didi's market value and shares of the company have dropped nearly 90%. Now, Didi is expected to begin preparations to list in Hong Kong. Kevin T. Carter, founder and Chief Investment Officer of EMQQ Global, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
