Facebook opens up its so-called "war room" (The 3:59, Ep. 476)

[MUSIC] Welcome to The 3:59, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. Our new social reporter, Queenie Wong, got a rare opportunity to check out Facebook's new, quote, war room. An operation the social media giant started in September, to quickly take down election-related fake news, disinformation, and fake accounts From it's site. My immediate impression on this was, wait a minute they just started this thing in September. But we've talked about this ahead of time and like they've been doing some election related stuff. Yeah, to be fair, Facebook has already been doing a lot to counter any kind of propaganda or fake news or hoaxes on On that social network, they've been helping with the elections in Mexico and France. Not so much elections, but still politically motivated in Myanmar. Also in the US, they got rid of all those propaganda pages that were Were based in the U.S. like last week. But this war room thing that they're showing off, this is more so like a dedicated office for it now. We have all these staffers here specifically focusing on On that and they're all working together now. Okay, so it sounds to me like yes, they are doing more, however, kinda of the big Super Bowl for them or at least the big issue going forward It's gonna be the midterms in a couple of weeks. And from everything that I have been hearing, you probably know more about this than I do. Is that, they're not prepared. They're not quite yet ready for the midterms and it might be a mess. I would disagree with the midterms being a SuperBowl or anything like that. When you have election security, everything is a constant threat. It's like everyday is your SuperBowl. In the sense that, you can't just wake up and And be like, we're gonna stop the election threats today and then not play for another whole season. Cuz these threats, they don't just start on a single day or a single election or anything like that. And they've mentioned this too in the article where it's basically like, these aren't gonna stop after the midterms. There's always gonna be another election that we have to watch out for and who's to say The midterm elections are more important than an election in Mexico or Canada or France or anything like that. That is true, yeah, you definitely want to make sure that, you know, election meddling doesn't end up happening. That being said though, I will say this-Facebook definitely propped up this room to be a lot more than it actually is. Like, they show off all these like different computers screens and they're monitoring all this activity and they have like a A Brazilian flag and then American flag in one corner and it's like this is a conference room. Yeah, different groups. This is a conference room, dude. And they have this big sign on the door, it was like war room. War room. [LAUGH] And it's just like, all right, chill out dude. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] All right, there's also an update on a major security breach at Facebook, which affected about 30 million users. Can you give us a quick update on that? Yeah, so this came out in a report from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. We still don't know who the hackers behind that breach was, but in this report from the Wall Street Journal, Facebook Seems to believe that this wasn't a nation-state attack. This wasn't North Korea, or Iran, or China, or Russia going into, and stealing all this date of 30 million Facebook users. It was allegedly spammers Pretending to be a digital marketing company, basically, probably to make a lot more profit by getting those people's eyes on their product. That's good. Now I can rest easy feeling good that my information may have been stolen from spammers, as opposed to a nation state, so- I mean, you know, lesser of two evils? Or. I don't know which. Pick you poison here. It would be nice if Facebook just protected my data. Last, Sonos and Roku are talking about becoming better friends. The two multimedia underdogs are in early discussion about adding Roku's voice assistant so Sonos' speakers. I like this story, not only because it's my scoop, but because We constantly talk about Amazon, Apple, Google. It's nice to see these two smaller companies that are trying, at least, to differentiate themselves and do a little bit to hopefully get more customers away from those big guys. Yeah, I mean, it's a partnership that makes a lot of sense. Sonos is huge in the World and Roku's huge and- Streamer. Streamers and watching television and content and things like that. It just seems to make sense. They're not gonna be able to make this crazy smart assistant on their own and plug it into all your TVs and things like that. But they have a really good shot at putting them together if, yeah No. Yes. Well, anyway. So you want to read more about these stories, check us out on CNET on [UNKOWN] ribbon. I'm [UNKNOWN]. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]