In Facebook Defense, Ex-Secuirty Boss Alex Stamos Said The Russian Troll Was Others' Fault Too

Alex Stamos - Facebook’s former chief of security admitted that Facebook was at fault in the Russia incident but he also blamed other parties for letting the incident turned out nasty. Stamos’s view was shared on a Washington Post opinion post.

This article was on just three days after the New York Times published a 5000-word investigative report on how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg dealt with the world’s largest social network crisis in the last three years.

Alex Stamos

The story from The Times accused Facebook’s top exes of ignoring the warning signs of the Russian trolls’ interference in the US presidential election. The two also took measures to hide the incident from the public. The accusation does not stop there. Facebook CEO and COO are under the fire for being “distracted by personal projects” thus all the key decisions are delegated to their subordinates.

Stamos did not try to deny Facebook’s fault. In fact, he agreed that Facebook should have acted differently by addressing the threats much sooner and it was true that the social network was not being transparent enough on this.

However, he denied the accusation that Facebook had tried to hide its involvement behind closed doors. Stamos also held other parties responsible for this incident as much as Facebook is.

In terms of the US intelligence community, Stamos believed that they failed to gather any practical information on Russia’s goal and do what it was supposed to do before the presidential election took place. They also showed minimum support after the incident had happened.

Stamos criticized Congress for the lack of facts and provide for the defense against the security breach.

As for the media, he said they had provided Russian trolls with countless stories covering the emails leaking from top Democrats’ accounts.

Stamos expressed his concern over the upcoming 2020 election and called on the public for a joint force to protect the whole society from similar acts in the future.

To tackle the gap in legislation that had indirectly allowed Russian hackers to interfere, Stamos called upon Congress to require transparency for political-related advertisements on platforms like Facebook. The law should also put a limit on how detailed the players can target the population.

In his opinion, Twitter, Google, or Facebook should be supportive of these legislations instead of disapproving them.

Stamos took some European countries as an example to support his thought on the division of responsibility, which should state specifically how much tech firms are responsible and what is left for the government.

He praised Germany and France for their effective government-corporation collaboration in cybersecurity without violating democracy’s principles.

As the press was involved in this Facebook’s incident, Stamos said that some leading voices will establish their own standards of how much they can cover data leaks without giving the country’s foes too much valuable information.

To conclude his opinion piece, Stamos stated that sooner or later, no one could avoid being part of the solution. Users should be skeptical about what approaches them on the Internet and social media platforms need to be more careful with security abuse.