In a blistering speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London Monday night, British Prime Minister Theresa May took Russia to task for meddling in the democratic process. The Kremlin, she said, is “seeking to weaponize information, deploying its state-run media organizations to plant fake stories and Photoshopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.” Addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin, she continued: “I have a very simple message . . . we know what you are doing, and you will not succeed. Because you underestimate the resilience of our democracies, the enduring attraction of free and open societies, and the commitment of Western nations to the alliances that bind us.”
That same day, Facebook shifted its own rhetoric about Russian interference in Britain, allowing, for the first time, that foreign agents may have used the social network to boost the Leave campaign, which resulted in last year’s decision to sever ties with the European Union. “To date, we have not observed that the known, coordinated clusters in Russia engaged in significant coordination of ad buys or political misinformation targeting the Brexit vote,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed Monday in response to questions about whether Kremlin-linked ads existed on Facebook in 2016 during the E.U. referendum.
That marks a subtle, but significant, departure from Facebook’s previous statements about suspicions of Russian interference. Hours earlier, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president of E.M.E.A., had offered a slight variation on that language, saying on Sky News that “to date, we have seen nothing to indicate that the known clusters that we saw in the U.S. election did anything in relation to Brexit or the general election.”
The tech giant’s shift follows a Wired report on Friday showing evidence that Russia had used Twitter to influence Brexit, looking at confirmed Russian-backed social-media posts from 2016. The posts showed a “network of accounts posted pro and anti-Brexit, anti-immigration, and racist tweets around the E.U. referendum vote while also targeting posts in response to terrorist attacks across the continent.”
The slow but steady change in Facebook’s messaging on Brexit echoes its evolving response to the possibility of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, which C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg first brushed off as ”a pretty crazy idea”—a statement he later professed to regret. Zuckerberg’s stance on so-called fake news has shifted, too; where he once claimed that “more than 99 percent” of stories on users’ feeds were “authentic,” he has since acquiesced that the problem is much more widespread.
Already facing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, Facebook is now fielding condemnations from U.K. members of Parliament, too—Labour Party lawmaker and former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw has long voiced concerns about Russian attempts to meddle with U.K. democracy, and Damian Collins, the head of the House of Commons‘ digital media and culture committee, told BuzzFeed that he’s written to Google, Facebook, and Twitter to ask for more details about how Russian-linked accounts may have used their platforms during both the E.U. referendum and the 2017 general election. “As Facebook has provided this information to the United States Congress, in relation to the 2016 presidential election, I see no reason why such information cannot be provided to the select committee,” he said, proving U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s prediction to be eerily prescient: “You have a huge problem on your hands,” she told Facebook’s general counsel during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing earlier this month. “And the U.S. is going to be the first of the countries to bring it to your attention, and other countries are going to follow, I’m sure, because you bear this responsibility.”
