Mark Zuckerberg sat in his Harvard dorm room back in 2003, kinda buzzed, and dreamed up a way to use the internet to connect a bunch of goofy undergrads in largely unimportant ways. Killer idea, dude. The rest is hundreds of billions of dollars of history. But Zuckerberg probably never imagined that his baby eventually would provide a cool new tool for the world’s spies.
And yet, on Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had uncovered a “coordinated political influence campaign” that used “inauthentic accounts and pages” over the past year to stir the pot on a number of lightning rod issues on both the left and right. Our politicians, who are usually actively engaged in their own brand of coordinated political influence campaigns, were quick to speculate that the Russians were behind it and that they must still be trying to influence our elections.
