Facebook Picked a Really Odd Way to Alert the Clinton and Trump Campaigns About Russian Hacking

And neither campaign received the warning.

Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

After Mark Zuckerberg told Congress on Tuesday that Facebook had warned the Clinton and Trump campaigns of Russian efforts to hack them, the response was swift—and incredulous. Top officials from both campaigns said that never happened. A day later, Zuckerberg said he’d misspoken. He said his company had in fact reached out to the Democratic and Republican national committees about the attempted intrusions. But this explanation raises a new question: Why would the social media giant contact the DNC and RNC instead of the campaigns themselves?

Zuckerberg’s initial statement about Facebook’s effort to alert the Clinton and Trump campaigns to Russian hacking efforts came during the first of two days of testimony before Congress this week. He said that “one of my greatest regrets” as Facebook’s CEO was not responding more quickly to Russian efforts on his platform to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. “We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyberattacks, which we did identify and notify the campaigns that they were trying to hack into them,” he testified, “but we were slow in identifying the type of new information operations.”

Zuckerberg’s comments led to a public rebuke from Robby Mook, who ran Clinton’s campaign, and Brad Parscale, who headed Trump’s digital operation in 2016. Mook and Parscale, who was recently named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, insisted that Facebook had not informed them or their teams that Russians had been attempting to hack them on Facebook:

During the 2016 election, Russian hackers were, of course, successful in stealing thousands of private emails belonging to senior Clinton campaign officials as well as reams of internal emails, documents, and data from the Democratic Party. Russian-backed entities also used Facebook and other social media to spread socially inflammatory false news stories, memes, and other content in an effort to sow division in the United States. But Zuckerberg’s testimony indicates that there were attempts by Russians to directly hack the campaigns on Facebook. A Facebook spokesman confirmed that Zuckerberg was referring to hacking into Facebook accounts or creating fake accounts.

Alex Stamos, the chief security officer at Facebook, responded to Mook and Parscale in a tweet from his personal account. Stamos said that Facebook had contacted the DNC and the RNC to “protect the accounts of key employees and to work together to spot potential additional malicious activity.”

During a second day of testimony on Wednesday, Zuckerberg reiterated Stamos’ account, saying that Facebook had notified the DNC and RNC about the Russian cyberattacks, not the Trump and Clinton campaigns themselves.

But why did Facebook contact the party committees and not the campaigns? One former senior Clinton staffer said that alerting the DNC to a cyberattack targeting Hillary Clinton was akin to conflating Netflix with Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service that hosts Netflix. “I think it’s crazy that they think calling the DNC is the same as calling the campaign,” the official said. A Facebook spokesman did not respond to an email about why the company chose to contact the party committees about the hacking efforts.

If Facebook did alert the DNC to the Russian cyberattacks on its platform, that message apparently never made its way to Clinton headquarters. The former Clinton staffer told Mother Jones that he did not recall receiving such a message from the Democratic committee. “No one at the DNC called us about a conversation with Facebook,” the ex-staffer said in an email. (The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.)

In his testimony before Congress, Zuckerberg said that Facebook had ramped up its internal security efforts to prevent future hacking and disinformation attempts. “We’ve deployed new AI tools that do a better job of identifying fake accounts that maybe be trying to interfere in elections or spread misinformation,” he said. “There are people in Russia whose job it is  to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well. So this is an arm’s race.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate