Kara Swisher: Mark, thank you so much for talking to me.
Mark Zuckerberg: Happy to do it.
Kara Swisher: This is our first interview in years, right? We’ve seen each other.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. Happy to do it.
Kara Swisher: No problem. I’m gonna start off with the news of the day. You saw the Putin/Trump press conference, essentially.
Mark Zuckerberg: I saw the news about it.
Kara Swisher: You saw the news about it. Tell me what you think about his idea that there is no evidence that the Russians used social media, and did different things during the election.
Mark Zuckerberg: Well the evidence that we’ve seen is quite clear, that the Russians did try to interfere with the election. What we saw-
Kara Swisher: This is on Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. All of what we saw is on Facebook. Then we’ve tried to cooperate with the government and the different investigations that are going on. They obviously have much more context than this. But what we saw, before the election, was this Russian hacking group, part of Russian military intelligence, that I guess our government calls APT28. They were trying to do more traditional methods of hacking: Phishing people’s accounts, just getting access to people’s accounts that way.
Mark Zuckerberg: We identified this, actually, in the middle of 2015 and notified the FBI. When we saw similar activity through the campaign in 2016, that they were trying to phish people’s accounts in both the DNC and RNC, we notified some of the people over there as well, [who] we thought were at risk. Later we also identified that they had set up a fake account and fake pages under the banner of, connected to this thing, DCLeaks, in order to seed stolen information that they had gotten to journalists.
Mark Zuckerberg: We, around the time of the election, had given this context to the FBI. They’ve clearly gone much further now, at this point, in terms of putting the whole story together. You could see that in the indictments that Mueller just issued over the last week or so. That’s the part that I actually think we got, and were on top of.
Mark Zuckerberg: Now, there’s a whole other area of election interference that we were slower to identify. That’s around the coordinated information operations that they were trying to run, and that was a different group. Instead of APT28, that was this group, IRA, the Internet Research Agency, which basically was just setting up a network of fake accounts, in order to spread divisive information.
Kara Swisher: Disinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. Misinformation. Divisive information.
Kara Swisher: Using advertising content in a variety of ways.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.
