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Social Media Giants Go Before Congress Over Russian Meddling In 2016 Campaign
Topic Started: Oct 31 2017, 02:15 PM (164 Views)
Webster
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(The Guardian) Facebook, Google and Twitter go before Congress
Hello and welcome to our live coverage as representatives of three American tech giants appear before Congress to explain how and why Russian operatives were given free rein on their networks to tamper with the 2016 presidential election.

Starting at 2.30pm ET, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter are scheduled to appear before the Senate judiciary committee. Tomorrow the same three companies are to appear before the Senate and House intelligence committees.

All three companies have admitted extensive Russian infiltration. On Monday, Facebook announced that Russia-backed posts had reached 126 million Americans during the election. But the tech companies have been slow to hand over information about what happened on their networks, and some analysts believe the true extent of the digital Russian invasion may have been even greater.

Google has said Russian operatives bought election-related ads on YouTube and Gmail as well as on its search engine. On Thursday, Twitter suspended advertising from all accounts owned by the Kremlin-allied media outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik.

The hearing is titled “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions.” Testifying are a couple lawyers (from Facebook and Twitter) and a security officer (from Google). We’ll have a live video stream for you when it begins.

Will public outrage over the failure of the tech companies to prevent widespread election tampering last fall register at the hearing? Or will the committee play nice? Will the witnesses be challenged to provide more information about what happened on their networks? Will they accept responsibility?

One explosive charge against the companies, especially Facebook and Twitter, is that they failed (do they continue to fail?) to stop imposter Russian accounts from attacking the American social fabric where it is most vulnerable, along lines of race, gender, class and creed.

The imposter accounts took on the identities of activists or extremists on various sides of hot-button issues and interacted with Americans who might respond to messaging around those issues, and whose preferences they hoped to shape, reinforce, and track.

One question is how sophisticated the effort was to micro-target Americans who might belong to key voter groups, meaning swing voters or voters who lived in swing areas. Highly sophisticated micro-targeting may have had an effect, though difficult to gauge, on the vote tally.
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-politics-social-media-facebook
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/19/big-tech-franklin-foer-book-world-without-mind
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Webster
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Wasatch Storyteller & Resident Forum Curmudgeon
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(The Guardian) Senator Ted Cruz accuses Google and Facebook of serving readers a disproportionate amount of “liberal” news stories and of excluding “conservative outlets.”

“It is disconcerting if those political positions become a lens through which American consumers consume news,” Cruz says. “Do you consider your sites to be neutral public fora?”

Stretch: “We think of FB as a platform for all ideas...”
Edgett: “Free expression and free speech is at the core of the twitter mission...”
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Webster
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--Unlike Kennedy, Cruz isn't asking questions. He's just listing conservative groups mad at Google and Facebook. Working the refs. (Matt Stoller, Open Markets Institute - 31 Oct. 2017)

--what a waste of incredibly valuable time w/ under oath reps from companies that rarely EVER have to answer for themselves (Charlie Warzel, Buzzfeed News - 31 Oct. 2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Senator Patrick Leahy says “I hear a lot of johnny-come-latelys.” There’s a lot that I think you could have done earlier, he says. He bets that the companies made lots of add dollars.

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Webster
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--@SenatorLeahy showing ads that show up on Facebook TODAY which mimic activity by Russian disinfo campaign. (Anthony De Rosa, The Daily Show - 31 Oct.
2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Senator Al Franken is up. “This is something you guys have to deal with and fix,” he says. Then he mixes it up pretty good with FB’s Stretch.

Franken: “How did FB which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points... somehow not make the connection that electoral ads paid for in rubles were coming from Russia? Those are two data points. American political ads and Russian money, rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”

Stretch says the question of account compromise was “a threat our security team was intensely focused on.. in hindsight we should have had a broader lens...”

Franken: “OK, people are buying ads on your platform with rubles... you can’t put together rubles with a political ad and go like, ‘hm, those two data points spell out something bad.’”
Stretch: We should have..

Franken: Ok OK OK. ...Will FB commit to not accepting political ads in the future paid for in rubles or say the North Korean won?
Stretch: We’re not going to permit political advertising by foreign actors.

Stretch: ‘Our goal is to...
Franken: ‘My goal is to get you to think through this stuff a little bit better!’
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Webster
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--Franken: "Can I have a little more time?” Chair: “No.” Stretch’s Inner Monologue: “Oh thank God.” (Julian Sanchez, 31 Oct. 2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Senator Hirono: Can you say that content on your platform did not have some kind of effect on the election?

Stretch: “We’re not well positioned to judge why any one person or an entire electorate voted as it did.”
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Graham: Are any of you in the content business?
Stretch: The vast vast majority of content on the platform is user-generated.

Edgett: We’re not in the content business.
Salgado: We’re not in the content business.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Franken’s back. Can Twitter and Google vow not to take foreign political ads paid for with foreign money?

Twitter’s Edgett: Sure.
Google’s Salgado: I want to check to make sure it’s a good signal.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Franken challenges Salgado and they kind of talk past each other.

Franken turns again to Stretch. He asks about ad targeting for the topic “jew hater” on FB. FB has removed the topic from the ad platform. But how could such categories be generated and allowed to exist.

Did you not know about “jew hater” ad targeting until the media told you?

Stretch: “Senator, these categories which of course deeply offensive... were algorithmically generated... we’re not aware of evidence that they were used.... we don’t know for certain that they were never used... we’re not aware of any revenue that was generated using that ad target...”
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Kennedy is back.

He asks Stretch if FB can generate lists of teenagers who think they’re overweight. Stretch says no.

Kennedy refers to a media report about FB micro-targeting teens during moments of emotional vulnerability.
Stretch: That reporting “relied on an internal document that was overstated...”

Kennedy: You have the ability to give me a list of people... who are teenagers who are insecure about their weight... just like I believe that you have the ability to go look at senator Graham’s or me, my profile... can you not?
Stretch: We have architected our system so that I may not.

Kennedy: But you could if you wanted to?
Stretch: It is precisely because blah blah...

Kennedy: I’m saying if you wanted to, is it not the case that you can go to John Kennedy’s profile and see things about JK as a result of my activity on FB...
Stretch: Any user could navigate to your profile.

That line of questioning kind of went nowhere.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Questioning of tech companies ends
The tech reps are done. There’s a second panel featuring Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and terrorism analyst Michael S Smith.
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