Facebook, Twitter officials say they’ll combat foreign meddling
In testimony before Congress, they say sites cleaned up.
WASHINGTON — Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey told lawmakers on Wednesday that they are better prepared to combat foreign interference on their platforms, even as Democrats and Republicans alike expressed doubts that the social media giants had fully cleaned them up ahead of the midterm elections.
Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, and Dorsey, the leader of Twitter, conveyed their message in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, almost a year after their companies told the same panel of lawmakers that Russia used inauthentic accounts to spread divisive political messages around the 2016 election. This time, though, lawmakers on the committee came equipped with a roster of fresh complaints — from the proliferation of fake video online to the heightened need to protect privacy and combat hacking.
As they testified, though, some of their most public adversaries sat behind them, including conservative media personalities like Alex Jones. The presence of Jones, who had been banned from both platforms for violating rules against harassment, seemed all the more striking given a Wednesday afternoon hearing in the House, featuring Dorsey, focused on allegations that tech is biased against right-leaning users.
The tech executives remained focused on their arguments to Senate leaders that they had made great strides cleaning up their sites and services ahead of the 2018 midterms, when the composition of Congress is up for grabs.
“We were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That’s on us,” Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee to open the hearing. “This interference was completely unacceptable.”
Dorsey, meanwhile, stressed to lawmakers: “We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we’ve acknowledged. Abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, disinformation campaigns and divisive filter bubbles — that’s not a healthy public square.”
“Required changes won’t be fast or easy,” he said. “Today we’re committing to the people and this committee to do it openly.”
The executives’ appearance - their first testimony to Congress - comes as lawmakers seek fresh assurances from the tech industry that it is prepared for the November midterm election, two years after major social media sites faced an onslaught of propaganda from Russia targeting the 2016 presidential race.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opened the hearing by citing the promise of social media before adding, “But we’ve also learned about how vulnerable social media is to corruption and misuse. The very worst examples of this are absolutely chilling and a threat to our democracy.”
Already, Russia and Iran have sought to interfere by passing themselves off as American groups or people to shape the views of American voters, claim lawmakers and technology executives. Facebook, Google and Twitter together took down hundreds of accounts tied to the two countries last month, a move that prompted Burr to open the hearing Wednesday by expressing fear that “more foreign countries are now trying to use your products to shape and manipulate American political sentiment as an instrument of statecraft.”