Essential tech news

THE RESULTS ARE ALARMING, IF NOT SURPRISING

THE US CONGRESS has recently had its first chance to hear from tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter regarding the revelation that all three had sold ads to Russian propaganda groups during the 2016 US election. Intended to be a meeting to discuss solutions to stop extremist content being propagated via social media, it instead revealed some uncomfortable truths.

When asked if he was aware of either China or North Korea purchasing ads on Facebook, the representative of the company said that “you don’t have the ability to know who every one of the [5 million] advertisers is today, right now”, and that they’re unable to “see behind the platform to understand if there are shell corporations” that hide the financial backers. It was a similar story for the two other tech companies, essentially stating that their policies and the nature of advertising made it very difficult to track exactly where the money was coming from.

While Facebook had 136 million individual users being exposed to Russian propaganda, Twitter’s representative revealed that Russia’s organic reach on the platform for 2016 bore 288 million impressions, as Russian bot accounts tweeted 1.4 million times.