How strange that the NYT article was about how they tried to pull other companies under the bus when they had privacy issues, and here Alex Stamos is pointing out that "most tech companies", "a lot of parties", "mass media", "NYT/WaPo/ESJ/TV", all failed too and should get the attention instead. The only thing missing is him saying Soros funded the GRU.
I know Alex Stamos left the company at this point, but he has every incentive to toe the party line on this, since his reputation could personally take a hit for his involvement.
The excellent and thorough NYT piece eviscerates FB leadership for employing the same sleazy disinformation tactics to defend themselves that FB failed to stop when weaponized by political actors.
Stamos has the gall to deflect Facebook's culpability by blaming responsible media outlets for getting compromised by the very disinfo that Stamos himself utterly failed to detect or stop during his tenure.
It's beyond irony or satire, it's fucking ridiculous that this guy still has a platform.
Yeah, I applaud his early efforts at uncovering some of this, but why didn't he do more? He should have taken his concerns to leadership sooner, pushed for more action, and notified authorities that a foreign entity was infiltrating the information pipeline. There's a new theme is all of this. It's not "too big to fail." Now, it's "too big to care."
"The mass media was completely played by the GRU and wrote the stories they wanted after the DNC and Podesta disclosures. You could argue that this was much more impactful than the IRA disinfo, and there has been almost no self-reflection by NYT/WaPo/WSJ/TV on their role."
That is really unbecoming of him. I'm already not a big Facebook fan, but that was for reasons outside of all of this continually unraveling tale.
To try and offload the blame for a specific matter to completely unrelated parties is just... well it doesn't look good on him at all. Quite frankly, the gesture inspires suspicion.
He's absolutely right. Publications like NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc. have played huge roles in exacerbating the damage caused by Russian interference, as well as blowing up non-Russia related stories that ended up being of little substance but were major factors in the election, such as the Clinton email fiasco. And there has been little to no signs of repentance from them. And I doubt there will be.
That said, absolutely none of that absolves Facebook of anything, and to bring it up is just deflection.
They fell prey to the same disinformation he knew about and failed to act on adequately. I can't fault those news outlets for failing to catch this problem at the time when they didn't have the knowledge Stamos did about it's true origins and intent. And if you think those news outlets haven't done some soul searching on the issue then, well, you haven't been reading them very closely these past two years.
I know Alex Stamos left the company at this point, but he has every incentive to toe the party line on this, since his reputation could personally take a hit for his involvement.