Senators put heat on tech giants
UNITED STATES: US senators have pressed Facebook’s chief lawyer on why the company did not catch 2016 election advertisements bought using Russian rubles, why its investigation of them took so long, and how much it actually knows about its 5 million advertisers.
Democrats and Republicans at the Senate crime subcommittee hearing yesterday fired questions for much of two hours at Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch, who said that in retrospect, the company should have done more.
‘‘In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens. There are signals we missed,’’ Stretch said about how the company missed political advertisements bought with Russian money. He called the ads ‘‘reprehensible’’ for their political divisiveness.
The hearing marked the first time tech executives have appeared publicly before US lawmakers on the Russia matter, and the tone represented a dramatic shift in fortunes for Silicon Valley, which for years has grown accustomed to favourable regulatory treatment in the US.
Lawyers for Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google also faced questions about how Russians used their services, but Facebook drew the bulk of senators’ ire because of its targeted marketing on the internet.
Facebook has broader reach than the smaller Twitter network, and it offers more powerful targeting capabilities than Google.
‘‘I suspect that your advertising department has watched the profits go up,’’ Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told Stretch, who responded that Facebook was committed to rooting out accounts that use fake names.
Lawyers for the three companies are scheduled to return to Capitol Hill today for two more hearings on Russian advertising spending.
The Russian government has denied it intended to influence the
2016 presidential election, in which Republican Donald Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Facebook, in a series of disclosures over two months, has said that people in Russia bought at least 3000 US political ads and published another 80,000 Facebook posts that were seen by as many as
126 million Americans over two years.
Senators said they could not understand the timing of Facebook’s disclosures.
‘‘Why has it taken Facebook 11 months to come forward and help us understand the scope of this problem?’’ Democratic Senator Chris Coons asked.
Stretch responded that when US spy agencies alleged in January that Russians meddled in last year’s election, ‘‘we weren’t sitting around’’. The company over the following months launched an investigation and reported the results, he said.
Facebook has said it is hiring 1000 more people to review ads, compiling a publicly searchable archive of political ads, beginning next year, and requiring more information about the identity of election advertisers. –