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The Shift

On Russia, Facebook Sends a Message It Wishes It Hadn’t

Facebook posts were an important tool for Russians trying to subvert the 2016 presidential election, federal prosectors said last week.Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

On most days, Facebook doesn’t have much in common with President Trump. But at the moment, both are in the damage-control business, as they try to get out from under the cloud of suspicion related to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

Their goals collided in awkward fashion over the weekend when Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, posted a series of messages on Twitter that were meant to clear up misconceptions about Facebook’s role in the election. Instead, he plunged the company deeper into controversy.

“Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election,” Mr. Goldman tweeted. “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

He continued: “The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump [sic] and the election.”

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A series of posts on Twitter by Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, plunged the company deeper into controversy.Credit...Christopher Michel

Mr. Goldman was tweeting only for himself, but his comments, which drew praise from other Facebook executives on Twitter, were an unusually candid statement that flouted Facebook’s well-sculpted messaging strategy, which has generally been to stay as far away from partisan debates as possible. The tweets arrived soon after the blockbuster indictment of Russian nationals by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and they were noticed by right-wing partisans, who saw them as supporting evidence for Mr. Trump’s “no collusion” claims. Soon, Mr. Trump himself had retweeted them approvingly.

Mr. Goldman eventually walked back some of his statements, but it was too late. Mr. Goldman had just given Mr. Trump something that looked like a Facebook-stamped exoneration.

Now, Facebook is in the uncomfortable position of reining in an off-message executive, while clarifying that it didn’t mean to bolster the president’s position.

“The special counsel has issued its indictments, and nothing we found contradicts their conclusions,” Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, said in a statement. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

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Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation, has laid out a detailed case about how Russians used digital tools during the 2016 presidential election.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Goldman did not respond to requests for comment, and the company declined to make him available for an interview.

It is Facebook’s right to defend itself, of course. The company has faced a raft of accusations of wrongdoing, some of which have indeed been overblown. Facebook was not the only social network manipulated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the company at the heart of Mr. Mueller’s indictment. And other companies, such as Twitter and YouTube, certainly share the blame for fostering a media ecosystem in which false news and propaganda can flourish.

But Mr. Goldman’s tweetstorm was unintentionally revealing. It showed that, years after hostile foreign actors first began using Facebook to wage an information war against the American public, some high-ranking officials within the company still don’t understand just how central Facebook was to Russia’s misinformation campaign, and how consequential the company’s mistakes have been. (Last year, in a tweet that fewer people saw, Andrew Bosworth, another Facebook vice president, claimed that the effects of Russian interference and fake news in 2016 were “marginal, even in a close election.”)

In real-world terms, a part of Facebook still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when burglars struck.

Even before Mr. Goldman’s tweets were blasted along to Mr. Trump’s 48 million followers, they lacked crucial context about what exactly Mr. Mueller’s investigation had found. He made sweeping pronouncements about the misuse of Facebook’s advertising products while neglecting to mention that most of Russia’s exploitation took the form of nonadvertising posts. He claimed that swinging the election in Mr. Trump’s favor was not a primary goal of Russia’s Facebook campaign, when Mr. Mueller’s indictment had just concluded that it was. He portrayed Facebook as having been eager to promote its findings on the Russia investigation, when in fact the company has made disclosures only under pressure from regulators, and has deliberately hidden data about Russia’s interference from outside researchers.

Some of Mr. Goldman’s claims may have been narrowly true, but they were a prime example of misdirection. Why is educating citizens about digital literacy the solution to misinformation, as Mr. Goldman suggested, rather than fixing the tech platforms that make misinformation hard to distinguish from truth? Why should it reassure us that most of Russia’s Facebook advertising was purchased after the election, rather than telling us that Facebook continued to drop the ball even after it knew it had a Russia problem?

More than anything, the details contained in the indictment make clear how vulnerable Facebook still is to a hostile actor. None of the safeguards it has announced so far — such as providing more transparency about political ads, or using snail-mail postcards to verify the identities of certain political advertisers — would stop a sophisticated and well-funded foreign influence operation. And many of the tactics the Internet Research Agency used in 2016 — including posing as American citizens to create large partisan Facebook pages and organizing offline rallies with the help of American co-conspirators — would be just as effective today.

In a recent cover story, Wired detailed the soul-searching journey that Facebook’s executives have undertaken since the 2016 election. First, they denied that they’d done anything wrong. Then, after the scope of Russia’s misinformation campaign became clear, they circled the wagons to protect the company’s reputation and appease its critics. Only recently have certain executives, like Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, come to appreciate the scale and scope of Facebook’s errors, and publicly accept responsibility for them.

We may never get answers about what Facebook knew of the Russian interference campaign in 2016, and why it didn’t act more forcefully to stop it. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) But it’s deeply troubling that eight months before the 2018 midterms, as malicious forces continue to use social media to sow discord and meddle in elections all over the world, some at Facebook seem more interested in defending themselves from criticism than owning their mistakes, fixing their platform’s problems and protecting our democracy.

Email Kevin Roose at kevin.roose@nytimes.com, or follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/kevinroose and on Twitter: @kevinroose.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: On Russian Meddling, Some Facebook Leaders Are in Denial. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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