Facebook announced the departure of Alex Stamos, its chief information security officer yesterday. Stamos has been with the company since 2015. His departure comes as the company struggles with a rapidly-growing problem over the role it played in Russian plans to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and its perceived lack of response.
Russian operatives paid $100,000 to show roughly 3,000 divisive ads to U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential election, but disclosures by the company have been few and far between. Stamos’ departure is the result of an internal struggle between some executives who believe the best way to preserve the company’s reputation is to divulge as little as possible about the episode and others who believe that reluctance does more damage to the firm than any disinformation campaign conducted by Russians.
Stamos, according current and former Facebook employees, has been an advocate for more openness. He put together a task force of engineers to investigate Russian activity on the platform in June 2016. That month the Democratic National Committee announced that its computer systems had been compromised by Russian hackers.
Several months later in November 2016, Stamos’ team found evidence that Russian operatives used Facebook to aggressively push stories about the DNC leaks as well as about the broader election. That same month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the idea that fake news stories on Facebook affected the results of the election a “pretty crazy idea.”
Over the next several months, Stamos’ team uncovered further evidence of Russian disinformation campaigns, and by the spring of 2017 he was advocating for disclosing as much information about the Russian effort as possible. He wrote a detailed memo describing Russian efforts on the platform. That memo was sanitized though, removing any mention of Russia. It acknowledges only that Facebook’s findings did not contradict a January 2017 U.S. intelligence community assessment that Russia tried to interfere with the U.S. election, and presented a general outline of how a hypothetical foreign government could manipulate users on Facebook.
It was only in September of 2017 after even more disinformation efforts were revealed by Stamos’ team that the company began to be more forthcoming about the extent of exploitation of the site’s users. By December 2017, Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, suggested he begin reporting directly to the company’s top executives. He was instead reassigned, and his security team was split up between Facebook’s product team and its infrastructure team.
His team used to consist of 120 people. Now it consists of three.
Questions about the way the firm handled the episode, along with questions about how much damage was, and continues to be, done to its image. Something Stamos is welcoming and believes in the long-run may be a positive for the company and for society as a whole.
“This conversation will start with anger, blame, and casting aspersions on motivations. In the long run, the optimization we want for each society and/or tech platform is the conversation we need to have,” Stamos wrote last week on Twitter.