Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at Meta, joins Cheddar News to discuss Meta's role in the Russia-Ukraine crisis

Between Bells

Meta's Head of Security Policy on the Company's Role in Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Welcome back to Between Bells. As the Russia and Ukraine crisis continues. Social media has become another target for the country's meta has newly established a special operation center staffed by experts from across the company included native Russian and Ukrainian speakers who are monitoring this platform 24 7, allowing for real time responses for more on this. I'll toss things over to our reporter, Michelle castello Michelle. Thanks Hannah, joining me now to discuss is Nathan Nathaniel Gleicher, who is the head of Security Policy at meta. So welcome to the show. Let's start with a broad overview what added safety measures has meta established to help aid during this crisis. So we've rolled out a series of specific products tools to help keep people safe. In Ukraine in particular, we rolled out a tool called lock that lets people lock their accounts down so that they can increase privacy and security settings very quickly, we've also reduced uh defended against ways that threat actors might try to identify targets on social media and in addition to Ukraine, because we've seen increased targeting of protesters in Russia. We're rolling these same tools out to Russia as well. So earlier this weekend, we saw that meta sites including facebook were blocked in Russia and Russia was claiming that meta was censoring their state run media. But on the flip side, you guys said that you had independent fact checkers that we're seeing misinformation being spread and that's why you blocked the state run Russian sites in this case. So, can you walk us through a little bit behind that decision and why you guys stand by it? So we have third party fact checkers from around the world who are independent organizations, journalists, journalistic organizations and experts in this space who review posts on our platforms and if they identify something that they determine as false or misleading and we put a label on that and then we down rank it. That means that far fewer people see the content and if they do search for it and find it, they'll see a clear label saying that it's false or misleading. The Russian government asked us to remove these labels from a number of posts from Russian state media entities. We refuse to do that. The labels are still up and they'll continue to be up to be clear. We're not seeing a complete block of our services in Russia. We do know that the Russian government is throttling our platform to prevent people from using facebook and instagram to protest the war to organize against it and to use it as a source of independent information. And our engineers are working to do everything we can to make sure that people can have can continue to have access to independent information across our platforms. Now, my colleague had a hinted about this earlier the fact that you guys have set up specific divisions that have Russian speakers as well as Ukrainian speakers to monitor the situation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that operation and what you guys are looking for in particular. So we've stood up a special operations center that brings in product experts, investigative teams and other experts from across the company and the goal is to help us find threats quickly and move quickly to make product changes to help keep people safe. I mentioned some examples of the steps we're taking to keep people safe. On the investigative side, we've identified two separate campaigns that are targeting public debate in Ukraine right now and we've taken them down and we're sharing information about them both publicly and with our partners and industry, I should say this type of work is work that we've been doing and have built teams that focus on for years now and so is some encouraging news is that these threat actors are getting caught earlier and earlier and reaching fewer and fewer people before they get taken down. As an example, one of the campaigns we removed was an influence operation that was a group of fake accounts, pretending to be real journalists based in keith when in fact they were operating from across Ukraine and from Russia and trying to undermine trust in the Ukrainian government, this operation only had about 5000 followers across all of facebook and instagram and although they were active on a number of other social media platforms as well, twitter youtube also Ok and VK which are Russian state media which are Russian social media entities, they had very little following on those platforms as well. Now you've also talked a little bit about your recent updates about seeing people in Ukraine being targeted in particular. There's one group that you guys have been following called Ghost Writer. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you know about them and what is why are Ukrainians being targeted at this time? Ghost writer is a hacking group. It's well known in the cybersecurity industry. It's been reported on multiple times and they are operating primarily across Eastern europe. What they will do is they will target the accounts of prominent figures, hack into their accounts and then try to use them to post false narratives and disinformation primarily messages that are either supportive of Russia or critical of Russia's enemies. In recent days we've seen them begin to target prominent voices in Ukraine, including journalists, a number of prominent military officials and government officials and politicians and what they've tried to do. What they begin by doing is they hack into the phones of their targets or into their personal email and then they use that to target their social media accounts across the internet. So this is a target that goes much deeper than meta and doesn't start with our platforms. They often target other places. What we will do here is we take control back from those accounts, we prevent them from posting their false narratives and we try to make sure that the original users can increase their security and get control to the accounts back. One really important message for everyone is that these threat actors and ones like them target uh personal email and a range of accounts. And so it's very important that everyone enable two factor authentication on all of their accounts across the Internet, not just their banking apps, not just social media, but also personal email and elsewhere. Now, that's thanks to Nathaniel Gleicher, who is the head of security policy at meta.