Voters cast their mail-in ballots at a ballot drop box outside Maricopa County Recorder and Elections Department southeast Mesa office during the Arizona state primary election in Mesa, Arizona, U.S. July 30, 2024.
Rebecca Noble | Reuters
Derek Bowens has never had such an important job. He’s the director of elections in Durham County, North Carolina, one of the most-populous areas of a state that’s increasingly viewed as crucial to the 2024 presidential contest.
So when a former precinct official emailed Bowens in July to warn him of a post containing voting misinformation that was spreading virally on Facebook, Bowens quickly recognized that he may be facing a crisis.
The post, written as if from an authority on the subject, said voters should request new ballots if a poll worker, or anyone else, writes anything on their form, because it would be invalidated. The same incorrect message was spread on Facebook during the 2020 election, but the platform flagged the content at the time as “false information” and linked to a story that debunked the rumor by Facebook’s fact-checking partner, USA Today.
Bowens said no such tag appeared on the post, which was widespread enough that the North Carolina State Board of Elections had to issue a press release on Aug. 2, informing voters that false “posts have been circulating for years and have resurfaced recently in many N.C. counties.”
“It was spreading and there wasn’t anything happening to stop it until our state put out a press release and we started engaging with our constituency on it,” Bowens told CNBC in an interview.
The elections board wrote a post on Facebook, telling voters to “steer clear of false and misleading information about elections,” with a link to its website. As of Wednesday, the post had eight comments and 50 shares. Meanwhile, multiple Facebook users in states like North Carolina, Mississippi and New Jersey continue to share the ballot misinformation without any notification that it’s false.
CNBC flagged posts with the false information to Meta. A company spokesperson said, “Meta has sent them to third-party fact-checkers for further review.”
Across the U.S., with 40 days until the Nov. 5 election, state and local officials say they are puzzled by what to expect from Facebook. Like in the past two presidential election cycles, the spread of misinformation on the social network has threatened to disrupt voting in what’s expected to be another razor-thin contest decided by thousands of voters in a handful of states. Recently, a Facebook post containing a false claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, ballooned out of control and gained resonance after it was repeated by Republican nominee Donald Trump in a debate.
In 2016, Facebook was hammered by Russian operatives, pushing out false posts about Hillary Clinton to bolster Trump. In 2020, the site hosted rampant misinformation about politically charged issues like Covid treatments, masking and voter fraud.
The big difference this go-round is that Facebook has largely removed itself from the equation. In 2021, Meta began pushing political and civic content lower in its algorithms, which contributed to a dramatic decline in news traffic last year for publishers. Earlier this year, Meta announced that it would deprioritize the recommendation of political content on Instagram and its Twitter-like Threads service, a move the company said more aligns with what consumers want to see on their feeds.
Still, posts with false information can spread rapidly across wide swaths of users along with comments that amplify the misinformation, and government agencies have little ability to counteract them, because they have such limited reach on the platform.
And while Facebook has lost some of its prominence due in part to the rise of TikTok, particularly among younger audiences, the site still had more than 200 million daily users in the U.S. and Canada at the end of last year, the last time it issued regional numbers. Facebook and Instagram are generally both in the top 10 among the most-visited websites and most-popular apps in the U.S, according to the Pew Research Center and Similarweb.
Interviews with nearly a dozen regional and statewide government officials with election-related duties reveal the challenges they say they’re having using and monitoring Meta’s apps, as well as other social networking services like X, now owned by Elon Musk. The officials say they’re working overtime to ensure the safety and integrity of the election but say they’re receiving little effective help from the companies, which scaled back their trust and safety teams as part of broader cost-cutting efforts that began in 2022.
Meta ultimately cut 21,000 jobs, including in trust and safety and customer service, over multiple rounds of layoffs. As CNBC reported last year, the company dissolved a fact-checking tool that would have let news services like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles as a way to verify their trustworthiness. Reuters is still listed as a fact-checking partner, but an AP spokesperson said the news agency’s “fact-checking agreement with Meta ended back in January.”
The Meta spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company’s “integrity efforts continue to lead the industry and we have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security — more than we had during the 2020 cycle.” The company says it now partners with about 100 third-party fact-checking groups across the globe “who review and rate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages.”
Challenges in Maricopa County
Like North Carolina, Arizona is one of the seven swing states expected to determine whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, win the presidency.
That reality has put Taylor Kinnerup in the spotlight. Kinnerup is the communications director for the recorder’s office of Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s population.
Kinnerup and her colleagues use social media to distribute up-to-date information about election-related procedures, like when residents can mail in early ballots or where to find their voting center. It’s a particularly sensitive job following Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in Arizona in 2020, when the state went blue for the first time in a presidential contest since 1996.
Given Maricopa County’s high profile during the election season, the state often attracts attention from Facebook users across the country. Many of them, Kinnerup said, are older and still leave comments about debunked conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Sharpie markers invalidate ballots.
Kinnerup said her team places “extreme emphasis on constant communication and transparency to the public,” actively sharing election-related content across Facebook and Instagram, particularly during peak hours when it’s more likely to reach voters.
A few months ago, Kinnerup discovered that her office’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were no longer linked, meaning she couldn’t access the apps using the same credentials, or automatically schedule a single post to go across both sites.
Ahead of the primary elections in July, Kinnerup said she struggled to resolve the account issues with Meta. She said she engaged in a monthslong email exchange with numerous representatives, but found there was “no way to really make progress.” When she did get a response, it was little more than a canned statement, Kinnerup said.
Meanwhile, Kinnerup is busy overseeing media and constituent tours of the county’s election facilities to help dispel false notions that the process is being rigged as her office continues to deal with the fallout of the 2020 election. Kinnerup said she led more than 20 such tours in June.
“I couldn’t be dealing with Meta every single day, because I had to be giving tours,” Kinnerup said. The time spent trying to find a fix “was a huge issue for me,” she said.
By the time Kinnerup said she’d resolved her account issues, in mid-July, she and her colleagues had wasted countless hours on the problem, leaving her team to “feel we were put in a position where the full message we were trying to get out wasn’t ever fully there.”
Even with her office’s Facebook and Instagram accounts working again, Kinnerup says their organic social media posts generate little engagement, and her team has used sponsored ads to help expand reach across the platforms. Her team has continued with the facility tours, leading 25 this month.
Meta’s spokesperson said the company has been hosting training sessions for state and local officials since February, informing them of tools like voting alerts, which allow them to send messages to people in their area.
Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves at the end of a presidential debate with US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
“There are multiple channels by which officials can reach us, including teams responsible for specific states and regions, and our ability to respond to them remains unchanged,” the spokesperson said.
Kinnerup said she was not “aware of any of this,” and in her year in the role has “never received any direct communication with Meta that I’m aware of.”
Bowens told CNBC in a follow-up email that he “was not aware of the sessions or the tools.”
Congress is well aware of potential problems. During a Senate hearing last week on election threats, Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, fielded questions about the company’s election preparedness. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, expressed concern about the safety and integrity of “down-ballot races at the state level, county level, local level.”
Intelligence agencies, Collins said, have told senators that bad actors from China could be focusing on disrupting regional races as opposed to the presidential election, and that state and regional officials “are far less likely to receive the kinds of briefings that we receive or to get information from Homeland Security or the FBI on how to be on alert.”
Clegg said Collins was “right to be concerned” and that Meta’s “vigilance needs to be constant.”
“It can’t just sort of peak at the time of the presidential elections,” Clegg said.
‘Three people will see it’
For Scott McDonell, the Dane County clerk in the swing state of Wisconsin, it’s been difficult to share accurate voting information on Facebook from his office’s official government account, which only has 608 followers on Facebook. McDonell said his posts get very little traction compared with years past.
“If I link to a story about election security, three people will see it,” McDonell said. Posts that include pictures do marginally better, he said, because “Facebook likes pictures.”
“Don’t link to an article, that will go to zero,” he said.
McDonell said many of his colleagues have “gotten abused” so much on Facebook in recent years that they don’t post about elections anymore.
“Basically, your average county clerk is terrified of it, and they just do it to share baby photos,” McDonell said.
In Los Angeles County, Jeramy Gray, the chief deputy of the registrar-recorder/county clerk office, said small government offices often lack the resources needed to effectively utilize social media and to troubleshoot problems.
Meta “recently put a team together to assist” his office, Gray said, adding that the company appears to be the “most mature” of the big platforms even if it’s not a “model partner.”
“What I would like to see is just more engagement from them, at least three to four months from a large national election, for them to reach out to key stakeholders at the state and local level to really talk about what they can do or what they’re doing,” Gray said.
Bowens, in North Carolina’s Durham County, said the tech platforms could be much more helpful in assisting his office and others as they navigate through some of the confusion about what type of content is acceptable.
Bowens said he’s concerned about acting too aggressively because of potential censorship issues and recognizes there’s a gray area between misinformation and citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
“You know, we’ve got a very diverse election system in this country,” Bowens said. “What was on that post may very well be true in another state. Therefore, is it misinformation?”
Amazon on Friday announced it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives.
The new funding brings the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion, though Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company behind the Claude chatbot and AI model.
Amazon Web Services will also become Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner,” according to a blog post. From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Some, like Microsoft and Amazon, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as working on in-house generative AI.
The partnership announced Friday will also allow AWS customers “early access” to an Anthropic feature: the ability for an AWS customer to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic’s Claude. It’s a unique benefit for AWS customers, according to a company blog post.
In March, Amazon’s $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic was the company’s largest outside investment in its three-decade history. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September 2023.
Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board.
News of Amazon’s additional investment comes one month after Anthropic announced a significant milestone for the company: AI agents that can use a computer to complete complex tasks like a human would.
Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview last month, adding it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC at the time, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company had been working on the tool since early this year, according to Kaplan.
In September, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s AI. In June, the company debuted its more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and in May, it rolled out its “Team” plan for smaller businesses.
Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two companies.
LONDON — Apple and Google could face a competition investigation into their dominance of mobile web browsers and apps in the U.K.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority issued a report Friday with a provisional decision from an independent inquiry group tasked by the regulator with carrying out an in-depth review of the mobile browser markets.
In the report, the group recommended that the CMA investigates Apple and Google’s activities in mobile ecosystems under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), a new U.K. law coming into force next year which seeks to prevent anti-competitive behavior in digital markets.
The DMCC is akin to the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. It gives the CMA the ability to designate firms as having “Strategic Market Status” (SMS) — which means they have a significant amount of market power in a certain digital business.
Under the rules, the CMA can impose major behavioral changes on firms that have SMS status, including ending “self-preferencing” of their own services, requiring interoperability — essentially allowing one piece of software to work with another smoothly — and banning anti-competitive behavior.
The CMA is required to undertake a formal investigation to give a firm SMS status.
For Apple specifically, the CMA inquiry group said it was concerned the tech giant’s App Store rules “restrict other competitors from being able to deliver new, innovative features that could benefit consumers” — for example, faster webpage loading on iPhone apps.
It added many smaller U.K. developers said they would like to use “progressive” web apps — which allow firms to offer apps outside of an app store — but that this technology “is not able to fully take off on iOS devices.”
The group also said it found a revenue-sharing agreement between Google and Apple to make Google the default search engine on iPhone “significantly reduces their financial incentives to compete in mobile browsers on iOS.”
“Markets work best when rival businesses are able to develop and bring innovative options to consumers,” Margot Daly, chair of the CMA’s independent inquiry group, said in a statement, adding that “competition between different mobile browsers is not working well and this is holding back innovation in the U.K.”
Apple said in a statement that it disagreed with the findings of the report and that it was concerned market interventions imposed under the DMCC “would undermine user privacy and hinder our ability to make the kind of technology that sets Apple apart.”
“Apple believes in thriving and dynamic markets where innovation can flourish. We face competition in every segment and jurisdiction where we operate, and our focus is always the trust of our users” an Apple spokesperson told CNBC via email.
Google was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
The CMA group had also looked into restrictions on the distribution of gaming services on Apple’s mobile app distribution platform. However, it’s now decided to drop this element of the investigation following a decision by the U.S. tech giant to allow cloud gaming services on App Store.
The regulator said interested parties have until Dec. 13 to share comments on its provisional findings. It expects to make a final decision in March 2025.
An iPhone 16 signage is seen on the window at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store on new products launch day on September 20, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Indonesian government expects Apple to increase its proposed $100 million investment into the country, according to state media, as the iPhone maker seeks clearance from Jakarta to sell its latest phones.
The American tech giant’s latest smartphone model doesn’t meet Indonesia’s 40% domestic content requirements for smartphones and tablets and hasn’t been granted clearance to be sold in the country.
The purpose of the ban is to protect local industry and jobs, with officials asking Apple to increase its investments and commitments to the economy in order to gain greater access.
According to a report from Indonesian state media, the country’s Ministry of Industry met with representatives from Apple on Thursday regarding its proposal to invest $100 million over two years.
The funds would go toward a research and development center program and professional development academy in the country, as per the report.
The company also plans to produce accessory product components, specifically mesh for Apple’s AirPods Max, starting in July 2025, it added.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
While the new offer is 10 times larger than a proposal that was reported earlier, the government is still striving to sweeten the deal to get a “fair” commitment.
“From the government’s perspective, of course, we want this investment to be larger,” industry ministry spokesperson Febri Hendri Antoni Arif told state media on Thursday.
He said that a larger investment would help the development of Indonesia’s manufacturing sector, adding that its domestic industry was capable of supporting production of Apple devices such as chargers and accessories.
While Indonesia represents a small market for Apple, it also offers growth opportunities as it has the world’s fourth-largest population, according to Le Xuan Chiew, a Canalys analyst focusing on Apple strategy research.
“Its young, tech-savvy population with growing digital literacy aligns with Apple’s strategy to expand [global sales],” he said, noting that it also offers potential for manufacturing and assembly that supports Apple’s efforts to diversify its supply chain.
Success in this market requires a long-term approach, and Apple’s investment offer demonstrates a commitment to complying with local regulations and paving the way for future growth, he added.