Facebook has known for years about a major source of political vitriol and violent content on its platform and done little about it: individual people who use small collections of accounts to broadcast reams of incendiary posts.
Meet SUMAs: a smattering of accounts run by a single person using their real identity, known internally at Facebook as Single User Multiple Accounts. And a significant swath of them spread so many divisivepolitical posts that they’ve mushroomed into a massive source of the platform’s toxic politics, according to internal company documents and interviews with former employees.
While plenty of SUMAs are harmless, Facebook employees for years have flagged many such accounts as purveyors of dangerous political activity. Yet, the company has failed to crack down on SUMAs in any comprehensive way,the documents show. That’s despite the fact that operating multiple accounts violates Facebook’s community guidelines.
Company research from March 2018 said accounts that could be SUMAs were reaching about 11 million viewers daily, or about 14 percent of the total U.S. political audience. During the week of March 4, 2018, 1.6 million SUMA accounts made political posts that reached U.S. users.
“A large amount of content comes from a small number of individuals,” said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy, in reference to the dangerous political content on the platform.
She argued that SUMAs’ proliferating posts hurt political discourse and said the company has failed to institute rules that could curb the spread of the inflammatory posts.
That’s backed up by disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of whistleblower Frances Haugen. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including POLITICO.
A Facebook spokesperson said the leaked documents don’t paint a comprehensive picture.
“It’s not a revelation that we study duplicate accounts, and this snapshot of information doesn’t tell the full story,” Facebook’s Joe Osborne said in a statement. “We enforce our community standards regardless of the kind of account that someone is using.”
Yet researchers who study misinformationin social media say the SUMA problem is a prime example of Facebook missing an opportunity to rein ininflammatory content.
About the Facebook Papers
POLITICO and 16 other American news organizations are publishing stories based on the Facebook Papers — internal documents taken by whistleblower Frances Haugen before leaving the company.
The Facebook Papers include company research, internal message board threads, emails, project memos, strategy plans and presentations that Haugen captured by snapping photos of her computer screen.
The disclosures were submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The consortium of media outlets has reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress, documents that black out the names of many lower-level employees. The documents were previously obtained by The Wall Street Journal, but our coverage provides new revelations from the files.
The group of media outlets coordinated on an embargo date of Monday to ensure enough time for reporters to review thousands of documents. This collection does not include all the files Haugen captured, and POLITICO expects to publish further stories as more documents become available.
“Facebook has completely lost control over the ways in which its platform has sort of pushed content that is not only not credible but also outrageous and at times extremely divisive,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, director of the Center For Global Digital Cultures at UCLA.
The March 2018 research warned that SUMAs artificially promote certain political viewpoints by providing a case study of an account under the name of Daisy Nunez, a “likely SUMA” who was participating in “unsavory behavior” that the company’s policies didn’t adequately address and couldn’t contain.
The research author said Nunez posted hundreds of links a day — sometimes at the rate of one per minute — and some 1,500 each week of “sensational and highly divisive” content. She saved links and built “a bank of some of the worst, most divisive content, to reshare later,” the author wrote.
A former Facebook employee who had worked on SUMA issues, and spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity to avoid unwanted attention to their current employer, said individuals running SUMAs use their authentic identities across all of the accounts, evading Facebook’s “fake account” policy by not impersonating another individual. The fact that these accounts weren’t lying about their identities, and some had relatively benign uses, led to a reluctance from the company to crack down on them heavily.
Even so, Facebook staff regularly identify SUMAs by finding groups of accounts that use the same identity — same birthday, thesame or slightly different name — across multiple accounts.
SUMAs typically use the same email address and same first names across accounts, along with “other data that they recycle and that can be used to fingerprint people,” Haugen told reporters in a briefing.
The other former staffer said some SUMAs are benign, belonging to people who want to have separate personal and business profiles. Internal research from January 2018 viewed by POLITICO noted that they’re a trend with teens who want to keep at least one account more private. But SUMAs start to raise red flags when they post with great frequency.
Accounts that frequently post or comment, even if they do so manually, violate Facebook’s community standards against spamming. Yet SUMAs can easily wield their multiple accounts to avoid running afoul of the rules, simply by switching between profiles, the former Facebook staffer said.
“Duplicate accounts provide an avenue for people who are doing bad behavior just to restart immediately upon being kicked off the platform,” Haugen told reporters.
The company does move to stop people from making duplicate accounts in the first place, like redirecting them to recover their existing profiles.
Harbath and the former employee said Facebook could target SUMAs more aggressively if it chose to — particularly those posting dangerous political rhetoric. The anonymous staffer told POLITICO that the company’s existing algorithms are “pretty good” at detecting SUMAs posting political speech.
Facebook has also chosen to push back against more intensive efforts to remove SUMAs. The mere fact that an account is a SUMA usually isn’t enough to warrant a takedown. Instead the account would first need to make at least one or two clear violations of Facebook’s rules — such as posting violent, bullying or harassing content.
“When looking at a lot of these, there was a strong push from other parts of the company that actions needed to be justified and clearly explained as a violation of rules,” Harbath said, adding that they often did not have the “stomach for blunt actions” that could result in a “high number of false positives” — or accounts wrongly taken down.
Facebook did take action against some political SUMAs in October 2018, such as removing the Right Wing News page and other pages run by Brian Kolfage. According to Facebook, the company removed more than 5 billion inauthentic accounts in 2020 before they were flagged, although Facebook didn’t specify how many were SUMAs. The company describes both SUMAs and fake accounts as “inauthentic.”
Message board comments from 2018 show that staffers were torn about Facebook’s approach, with some arguing that since SUMAs represented real people they should be treated leniently despite their violation of Facebook policies on multiple accounts.
“A SUMA account represents the realistic views of a user, just under a pseudonym,” one employee commented in response to the March 2018 research that warned of the dangers of these accounts. “They generally aren’t posting as a drastically different individual or representing views that are not their own in an electorate to which they don’t belong.”
SUMAs make up a large portion of Facebook’s new sign-ups despite the company’s ban on multiple accounts. In a 2021 internal Facebook post titled, “Update on the FB unwanted SUMA problem,” one employee wrote that SUMAs comprised 40 percent to 60 percent of fresh accounts.
The same document warned that Facebook’s AI model that identifies SUMAs both undercounts them and underestimates their effects.
The problem is also evolving. Harbath noted some operators’ growing sophistication in using multiple devices for their accounts.
Facebook also could have business motives for leaving SUMAs mostly alone. Employees and academics who study social media ethics said trying to boot these accounts would likely disrupt sign-ups and use of the site, especially if people are wrongly targeted.
“You want the system to be frictionless, you want it to be easy to create an account, because that’s where the money” is, said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor specializing in misinformation and digital forensics.
It’s unclear if a crackdown would have a significant effect on Facebook’s advertising revenue. The company said it has disclosed to Facebookers, advertisers and investors alike that these accounts exist.
“Nothing in this story changes the estimate of duplicate accounts we disclose in our public filings, which includes new users, or that we provide context on in our ad products, ad interfaces, in our help centers, and in other places,” Facebook’s Osborne said.
Farid was skeptical that Facebook couldn’t parse out these accounts and remove them — arguing that the company tends to downplay or tout its powers depending on whether its executives are being hauled up before Congress or recruiting advertisers.
“You can’t, on the one hand, monetize to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year phenomenal amounts of data and personal information, and then on the other side when it comes to mitigating harms, say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know how to do this,’” he said.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
