Representatives for Twitter, Facebook, and Google testified before the
Senate Intelligence Committee today about Russian interference on their
platforms. Here’s what we learned:
We’ve known for a while that Russian trolls spent $100,000 to promote ads on Facebook during the 2016 election, and we learned this week that posts created by these trolls reached 126 million Americans—more than a third of the US population. But Facebook has continuously downplayed the impact of Russian spending on its platform, arguing that real political campaigns spend far more on advertising. During today’s hearing, Facebook’s vice president of AR and VR and former VP of advertising Andrew Bosworth tweeted, “Legit political ad spend was three orders of magnitude more than the $100k here. Similar story for organic content.”
However, Sen. Richard Burr demonstrated today that Russian-funded ads were influential even though they weren’t expensive. He showed ads sponsored by two troll-backed Facebook pages, “Heart of Texas” which was liked by more than 250,000 people and “United Muslims of America” which was liked by more than 320,000 people, that promoted competing protests outside an Islamic center in Houston, Texas. The ads spurred a real-life protest.
According to news reports, roughly a dozen anti-Muslim protesters and more than 50 counter-protesters heeded the call. “Establishing these two competing groups, paying for the ads and causing this disruptive event in Houston cost Russia about two hundred dollars,” Burr said.
If Google, Facebook and Twitter don’t step up their game, Feinstein said, Congress would step in to regulate them. “You’ve created these platforms and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will,” she said.
Read more: Everything We Learned About Russian Election Interference From Facebook, Twitter, and Google
We’ve known for a while that Russian trolls spent $100,000 to promote ads on Facebook during the 2016 election, and we learned this week that posts created by these trolls reached 126 million Americans—more than a third of the US population. But Facebook has continuously downplayed the impact of Russian spending on its platform, arguing that real political campaigns spend far more on advertising. During today’s hearing, Facebook’s vice president of AR and VR and former VP of advertising Andrew Bosworth tweeted, “Legit political ad spend was three orders of magnitude more than the $100k here. Similar story for organic content.”
However, Sen. Richard Burr demonstrated today that Russian-funded ads were influential even though they weren’t expensive. He showed ads sponsored by two troll-backed Facebook pages, “Heart of Texas” which was liked by more than 250,000 people and “United Muslims of America” which was liked by more than 320,000 people, that promoted competing protests outside an Islamic center in Houston, Texas. The ads spurred a real-life protest.
According to news reports, roughly a dozen anti-Muslim protesters and more than 50 counter-protesters heeded the call. “Establishing these two competing groups, paying for the ads and causing this disruptive event in Houston cost Russia about two hundred dollars,” Burr said.
If Google, Facebook and Twitter don’t step up their game, Feinstein said, Congress would step in to regulate them. “You’ve created these platforms and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will,” she said.
Read more: Everything We Learned About Russian Election Interference From Facebook, Twitter, and Google
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