Before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, I took an extensive look into the state of Facebook’s platform and what I found was interesting—and terrifying. Three months and 1,000 screenshots later, my efforts involved collecting more than 250,000 posts, 5,000 political ads, and historic engagement metrics for hundreds of Facebook pages and groups using a diverse set of tools and data resources. Some of my findings were anticipated. Others were not.

The takeaway? It’s not good. Many of the dangers pointed out years ago seem to have grown exponentially on Facebook. But it’s not just isolated to Facebook.

As I told NBC’s David Ingram and The Hill’s Ali Breland, the visibility of extreme content and hate speech on Instagram was possibly the worst I’d ever seen. To make matters worse, there’s been a disturbing pattern of online polarization and radicalization followed by acts of ethnically and ideologically directed violence.

This study, however, is specifically about what was happening on Facebook in the days before the 2018 midterm elections. I won’t attempt to associate other platforms or theorize about the greater “why?” My work usually involves exploring cross-platform information flows and system-wide trends. The reason I chose to take a more narrow focus here is because I had more than enough data to do it—and what I found was important.

There are no rules stipulating that page manager accounts must be connected to the actual purchaser of the ads.

After this undertaking, one startling impression is that it’s the scale of the problems, not the sum of the problems, that represents the greatest threat. The issues I’ve found on Facebook the past few months—through large-scale analytics, content analysis, extensive political ad archive querying, and close inspection of thousands of posts and information-sharing activities—involve patterns that have been on the radar of the company’s leadership and American politicians since the 2016 election. They’ve been revisited in scores of hearings, broadcast on television, and recited around the country.

This project was extensive, so I’ve partitioned my findings into three parts, each focusing on a distinct set of challenges that face the platform. I see Facebook’s current challenges—in addressing the rise of extreme content, group conflict, and the coordinated manipulation of information—as best grouped into three categories: 1) recursive accountability, 2) shadow organizing, and 3) granular enforcement.

The findings presented in this first part are highly indicative of the company’s future success in its political transparency efforts and public accountability initiatives. The second part, focusing on shadow organizing, is meant to offer insights into coordinated efforts to manipulate users and the flow of information on Facebook. The third part looks at granular enforcement, focusing on the company’s challenges in enforcing its rules and terms of service.

Recursive ‘Ad-ccountability’

On a number of occasions, I found influential Facebook pages, including the verified pages of publishers and political funding groups being managed by accounts based outside the United States. To clarify, these don’t just involve politically themed pages with foreign managers, something BuzzFeed found and reported on in May. This is a much more concerning scenario: influential pages with foreign “manager” accounts that have been running extensive political ad campaigns on Facebook, targeting users in the United States over the past six months.

Some of these pages reported significant changes to the number of manager accounts and the locations of those accounts at the same time they ran targeted domestic political ad campaigns. There are known issues with Facebook’s political ad verification process, such as that it only requires one administrator for each page to get “verified” in order to be approved to run campaigns. And, of course, there are no rules stipulating that page manager accounts must be connected to the actual purchaser of the ads.

I found instances of influential pages with foreign manager accounts that have run targeted political campaigns without a “paid for” label.

The examples I’m sharing exhibit a pattern that reveals the structural “loopholes” in Facebook’s political ad disclosure system. The larger problem, however, which I’m calling “recursive ad-countability,” emphasizes that Facebook does not appear to have a rigid protocol in place to regularly monitor pages running political campaigns after the initial verification.

A secondary theme in the ad campaigns with foreign page managers I found was the use of information-seeking “polls”—aka sponsored posts asking their target audiences, in this case U.S. Facebook users, to respond to questions about their ideologies and moral outlooks. Last, but not least, I also found instances of influential pages with foreign manager accounts that have run targeted political campaigns without a “paid for” label.

While the findings below might not represent “peak threats” in Facebook’s destabilization of electoral processes, they are serious and have long-lasting implications for its accountability to the U.S. public.

After looking into Facebook’s platform, I found an alarming number of verified pages, including pages running large political ad campaigns, being managed by foreign accounts. I understand Facebook’s verification process only requires one manager account, but I find this problematic.

Here’s why: On September 12, I observed the Facebook page for the publishing conglomerate Liftable—a company that is now the owner of the right-wing Western Journal and has a long record of media acquisitions—being managed by 100 accounts representing at least seven different countries.

All screenshots: the author

Barely one month later, on October 13, Liftable’s verified page reported being managed by only 44 accounts, which were all based in the United States. Over the same time period, Liftable ran political ads, including targeted socially themed “polls,” that presented users with moral and ethical questions (see above). The company’s political ads, available through Facebook’s ad archive appear to date all the way back to March 1, 2018.

I understand that larger digital publishers are likely to have a diverse range of needs in running their business operations, and this is especially true after a series of acquisitions. So while the example here is Liftable’s page, I see this as a prime example of the lack of recursive accountability on Facebook’s part.