This morning, the Senate Intel committee heard from top experts on social media manipulation and foreign influence operations like the one we saw during the 2016 election.
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We have helped reveal the Russian playbook. We have raised public awareness regarding the threat. And we’ve succeeded, however incrementally, in pressuring the social media companies to take steps to address the problems on their platforms.
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That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have a lot more work to do.
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Russian active measures on social media have two things in common: They are effective. And they are cheap. For just pennies on the dollar, they can wreak havoc in our society and in our elections.
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Much of the initial focus was on paid advertisements. But it quickly became clear that ads represented a tiny percentage of IRA activity – compared to the hundreds of thousands of free Facebook and Instagram posts, pages & groups, and millions of tweets from IRA-backed accounts.
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Today, it is becoming clearer that activity represents just a small fraction of the total Russian effort on social media.
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I’m also concerned that the U.S. government is not well positioned to detect, track, or counter these types of influence operations on social media.
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But all the evidence the Senate Intelligence Committee has seen to date suggests that the platform companies – namely, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and YouTube – still have a lot of work to do.
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Before I went into public service, I spent more than 20 years in the tech business. I have tremendous respect for these companies and what they represent. When they are at their best, they are a symbol of what this country does best: innovation, job creation, changing the world.
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I’ve been hard on them because I know they can do better to protect our democracy. They have the creativity, expertise, resources, and technological capability to get ahead of these malicious actors.
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That’s why we will be hosting senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google for a hearing on September 5th. To hear the plans they have in place, to press them to do more, and to work together to address this challenge.
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Today we focused on what happened in 2016 and what is happening now, but Russian active measures have revealed a dark underbelly of the social media ecosystem.
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These same tools that spread misinformation can negatively affect other aspects of our lives. I think we need to start pushing ourselves beyond just recognizing the problem and start to push actual policy ideas forward.
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End of conversation
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And they are fighting the charges! They didn’t have to answer the indictment but they did. Does that sound like guilt to you? Who was the company advising you? CrowdStrike....again?
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Okay, can we please get this straight???? Was it the Mueller investigation team who found this evidence or Social media?? You cannot have it both ways Mark!!
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Which had absolutely nothing to do with Trump.
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Indictments of 3 companies that presented in court with their lawyers and ask Special Counsel for proof and Counsel had no proof. Sound like indictments were made for political propaganda and gain but nothing was said about the poor outcome proof from these indictments.
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You're in this so deep, Mark, you have no clue how to get out of it, huh? Obvious. Keep jabbering, old man!
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