By Krystal Ball
Opinion Contributor
Facebook said on Tuesday that they had uncovered an influence campaign aimed at the midterm elections.
Here’s what they announced that they: “removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
Now we don’t know if this is the full extent of what’s going on, there could be other accounts and pages as of yet unknown. But from what we’ve seen so far, the effort doesn’t look terribly impressive.
It’s hard to imagine the mindful being page really being the lynchpin of the Heitkamp reelect in North Dakota. And yet Russia continues making these fake pages, inciting people against each other with inflammatory posts, and organizing for some real life protests.
They clearly think it’s working. And if these ham-handed, grammatically challenged posts are really impacting American politics, i don’t think the really hard questions are for Facebook or Congress, they’re for us.
What does it say about the state of our nation that our divisions can be exacerbated so easily by some fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots?
If the American body politic were strong, than a phony Aztlan warriors group would be no threat to us.
But like an immuno compromised patient who dies from chicken pox, we are susceptible. We are susceptible not because of Facebook or Twitter, but because we are losing grip on the common thread that binds us together as Americans.
We are dealing with a scarcity of good jobs and massive economic and cultural transitions. This stress to the system has us scrambling and reverting to a tribalism that pits us against each other along lines of race, education, culture, religion, geography, and gender.
Facebook can ban all the accounts they want and they should.
Congress can crackdown and they should too.
Anyone who is working with foreign actors to sway our elections is a traitor to our nation and should be dealt with as a criminal. But these are not real answers.
The real answer is a nation united enough not to take the bait.
Krystal Ball is the co-host of “Rising,” Hill.TV’s morning news show.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.
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