Facebook works on vote threats
WASHINGTON — The head of the House Intelligence Committee said Friday he has been assured by the CEO of Facebook that the company is working on ways to prevent foreign actors from disrupting next year’s elections.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California met with Mark Zuckerberg and said the Facebook CEO showed a deep awareness of the threat to the elections from so-called “deep fake” videos and other technically advanced tools.
Schiff told reporters Facebook is “in the process of developing what I hope will be very strong policies on this. … I think he (Zuckerberg) fully appreciates the gravity of the situation.”
It was Zuckerberg’s third day of private meetings in Washington, following other sessions with top lawmakers and President Donald Trump. Zuckerberg also met Friday with the leader of a House antitrust investigation into the big tech companies and pledged to cooperate.
The House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, led by Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., is investigating the market dominance of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The lawmakers recently asked the companies for a detailed and broad range of documents related to their sprawling operations, including top executives’ internal communications.
Cicilline and Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, met in a separate session with Zuckerberg. Cicilline told reporters afterward that “Mr. Zuckerberg made a commitment to cooperate with the investigation, and we look forward to his cooperation.”
That cooperation would cover “a whole range of things,” Cicilline said, including providing the requested documents.
Facebook said Friday that it has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps made by about 400 developers as part of an investigation following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The announcement came the same day that unsealed legal documents in Massachusetts disclosed that Facebook had suspended 69,000 apps. In the vast majority of cases, however, the suspensions came not after any kind of serious investigation but because app developers had failed to respond to emailed information requests.
Facebook said Friday its app investigation is ongoing and it has looked at millions of apps so far.