Silicon Valley’s hypercompetitive tech giants are expected to show a unified front when they face their first public grilling from Congress over the Russia’s manipulation of their ad services to meddle in last year’s presidential election.
Facebook, Twitter and Google’s leading lawyers are scheduled to appear before the Senate and House intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Capitol Hill insiders anticipate they firms will reveal more detail about the historic breach as a way to cool lawmakers’ desire to heavily monitor their largely unregulated industry.
The showdown will take place just two days after special counsel Robert Mueller announced his first Russia-related charges in a 12-count indictment brought against former Trump presidential campaign manager, Paul Manafort, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett and Google General Counsel Kent Walker are slated to testify.
A chorus of critics is eager to hear their plans to improve the transparency of American digital political advertising and the metrics to track activity. Many of the ads were designed to boost false news stories, provoke racial and political divisions, and even try to organize actual rallies.
And the scale of the Russian social media push was immense, the companies say. The New York Times and Associated Press reported Monday that Facebook will tell the committee that some 126 million of its users were reached by Russian-generated inflammatory posts while more than 1,000 videos were uploaded to Google’s YouTube service.
Lawmakers say they are especially eager to learn about efforts by the firms to gain greater control over what content appears on their hugely influential media platforms.
The Senate Intelligence Committee wants this completed quickly. Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, North Carolina Republican, recently said the panel’s members need to know “what steps they [the firms] area taking to mitigate foreign interference in the 2018 election cycle and beyond.”
Sen. Mark Warner, that committee’s lead Democrat, has also repeatedly slammed Silicon Valley for not disclosing what its top executive know about foreign efforts to meddle in the 2016 vote.
Outrage across Capitol Hill has bubbled ever since Facebook first reveled that Kremlin-linked agents bought at least $100,000 in ads during the campaign. Since then, details have emerged about the number of ads, their divisive content, and the way the ads targeted critical swing-state voters in states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
A major issue has been the reach of the ads. Facebook initially claimed roughly 10 million people saw the propaganda.
Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism has recently analyzed six of the Russian sites that have been made public. Its researchers found that content from the sites — Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas, Blacktivists, United Muslims of America, Secured Borders and LGBT United — had been “shared” 340 million times.
“The reality is that Facebook failed to fully comprehend the scale of the attack and has refused to provide a full public account of what happened,” Justin Hendrix, Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, recently wrote. “Given its half $1 trillion in market capitalization and its monolithic role in shaping the consumption of news, information and opinion, now is the time to demand that Facebook answer to the American people.”
Russia journalists have reported on a St. Petersburg “troll farm” operation, which claimed to have generated roughly 70 million page views in just one week in October 2016. Some experts have estimated that hundreds of such troll farm were active in the months before the election.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to overhaul the firm’s advertising systems and make it easier to identity those who buy political ads on the network. Twitter has done the same.
Several lawmakers have pushed a proposal that would create a public list of who funds social media ads. But free-speech advocates have noted that significant questions remain about the definition of a “political ad” and possible chilling effect on free speech.
• Dan Boylan can be reached at dboylan@washingtontimes.com.
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