Facebook’s chief security officer is leaving the company Aug. 17 after a brutal year of allegations against the company of foreign meddling.
Alex Stamos will be leaving the company, he announced Wednesday, and will instead begin teaching and researching at Stanford University in September.
“It is critical that we as an industry live up to our collective responsibility to consider the impact of what we build, and I look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with the security and safety teams at Facebook,” Stamos wrote on his official Facebook page.
Stamos’s Facebook post is void of any mention of the allegations of foreign influence on Facebook’s massive platform.
“For the last three years, I have been proud to work with some of the most skilled and dedicated security professionals in the world in one of the most difficult threat environments faced by any technology company,” he wrote.
Facebook announced Tuesday that it has identified and removed 32 fake Facebook and Instagram pages aimed at influencing the midterm elections in November. The pages were left-leaning in nature and several posts aimed to stir up the left against President Donald Trump. (RELATED: Foreign-Influenced Facebook Pages Behind Last Year’s Pro-DACA, Anti-Trump Protests)
“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts — including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change,” Facebook said in a statement.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday that foreign nation-states are behind the campaign on Facebook. Kirstjen doesn’t know which ones, she said, but didn’t rule out Russia.
“This threat is very real, and Americans need to know that,” Nielsen said on Fox News’ “The Daily Briefing.” “The Russians, or whoever it is in this case — we haven’t attributed it — but Russians and other nation-states absolutely are attempting to manipulate us.”
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