Facebook, Twitter on defense in U.S. Congress over foreign bids to tilt politics

Facebook, Twitter on defense in U.S. Congress over foreign bids to tilt politics

WASHINGTON: Top executives from Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc defended their companies in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday over what lawmakers see as a failure to combat continuing foreign efforts to influence U.S. 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 U.S. 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, U.S. President Donald Trump, without appearing to offer any evidence, accused the companies themselves of interfering in the U.S. 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 Nov. 6 election. The report gave no other details.As the hearing began, social media stocks fell, with Twitter down 4.5 percent and Facebook around 1 percent lower.Executives from the companies, which have repeatedly denied political bias, have traveled to Washington several times to testify in Congress, including 10 hours of questioning of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg over two days in April.The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into Russian efforts to influence U.S. public opinion throughout Trump’s presidency, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that entities backed by the Kremlin had sought to boost his chances of winning the White House in 2016.

from The News International - World https://ift.tt/2Q6Z4sQ

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