Facebook, Twitter execs face grilling

TOP executives from Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc defended their companies in the US Congress yesterday over what lawmakers see as a failure to combat continuing foreign efforts to influence US politics.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who testified alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, acknowledged to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the company was too slow to respond to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 US election and general American political discourse, but insisted it is doing better.

“We’ve removed hundreds of pages and accounts involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior — meaning they misled others about who they were and what they were doing,” Sandberg said.

“When bad actors try to use our site, we will block them,” she said.

Dorsey also described Twitter’s tighter monitoring of malicious use of its platform, including notifying law enforcement last month of accounts that appeared to be located in Iran. He said it suspended 770 account for violating Twitter policies.

Facebook, Twitter and other technology firms have been on the defensive for many months over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns over user privacy.

“Unfortunately, what I described as a ‘national security vulnerability,’ and ‘unacceptable risk,’ back in November remains unaddressed,” Senator Richard Burr, the committee’s Republican chairman, said.

“Clearly, this problem is not going away. I’m not even sure it’s trending in the right direction,” he added.

Before the hearing, President Donald Trump, without appearing to offer any evidence, accused the companies themselves of interfering in the US mid-term elections in November, telling the Daily Caller that social media firms are “super liberal.”

Trump told the conservative news outlet in an interview conducted on Tuesday that “I think they already have” interfered in the November 6 election. The report gave no other details.