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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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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Thank you.
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Russian playbook? What threat?!! We poked Russia in eye with our ME policy backing Syrian rebels and bombing the desert PRETENDING to go after ISIS. EVERYONE took advantage of Obama's weakness! EU, NATO, Iran, Russia, NK. Ever wonder why Congress' approval is so abysmally low?
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