In short: Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote a note on Thursday about election interference and how preventing election interference is bigger than any single organization. This was essentially Zuckerberg stating that he and Facebook need help and can’t prevent those looking to interfere in the election, by themselves. Zuckerberg noted that “While I’d always rather Facebook identified abuse first, that won’t always be possible. Sometimes we’ll only find activity with tips from government, other tech companies or journalists.” Zuckerberg went on to say that there needs to be a culture shift where stopping “these threats is what constitutes success.”
Background: All of this election interference goes back to the 2016 Presidential Election, when Russia interfered in the election, in favor of making Hillary Clinton look bad so that she wouldn’t takeover the White House. While President Trump wouldn’t admit that Russia did interfere, until recently, all of the intelligence agencies and even social media platforms, agreed that Russia did interfere. Now, all of these parties are doing what they can to make sure that foreign powers no longer interfere in elections. This included Facebook and Twitter being more transparent about who is buying ads, who is running these Facebook pages, and what a specific person is running for or what office they currently hold.
Impact: Zuckerberg is right, in saying that preventing election interference is bigger than a single organization, and that everyone needs to work together. This could make things worse, though for the mid-terms which are less than eight weeks away right now. Facebook and others have been asking for some help from the government and bringing in regulation to Silicon Valley, which should help prevent election interference, but so far Congress hasn’t put out any regulations.