Technology giants Facebook, Google and Twitter will give a Congressional panel more details about the reach of Russian ads and posts in the US in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, according to testimony obtained by Bloomberg.<\/p>\n
At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch plans to say that 29 million people were directly served content from accounts backed by the Internet Research Agency, a pro-Kremlin Russian group.<\/p>\n
After those posts were liked, shared and commented on via Facebook\u2019s social network, they landed in the News Feeds of about 126 million people at some point over a two-year period, the testimony shows. That\u2019s equivalent to about 40% of the US population.<\/p>\n
Twitter found 2,752 accounts associated with the IRA,\u00a0according to prepared testimony obtained by Bloomberg – more than 10 times the number originally disclosed.<\/p>\n
Alphabet Inc\u2019s Google will say the impact on its sites was much smaller, with $4,700 worth of ads linked to the IRA, compared with the $100,000 Facebook earlier disclosed.<\/p>\n
Eighteen English-language YouTube channels were \u201clikely\u201d linked to the Internet Research Agency, Google said in a blog post ahead of the hearing.<\/p>\n
Those channels posted 1,108 videos that made up 43 hours of total content, and racked up 309,000 total views in the US from June 2015 to November 2016.<\/p>\n
The testimony from all three companies underscores that Russian operations seeking to influence the outcome of the election were more broadly focused than advertising, aimed at sparking tension through the spread of incendiary opinions.<\/p>\n
All three emphasize that they\u2019re eager to come up with solutions to prevent similar meddling in the future, and highlight what they\u2019re doing to coordinate with Congress so investigators can understand the problem.<\/p>\n
Facebook and its internet peers may be betting that being helpful and conciliatory now makes them less likely to face cumbersome regulation on political advertising and content.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry and our society,\u201d Stretch will say, according to the planned testimony.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other internet services to try to sow division and discord \u2014 and to try to undermine our election process \u2014 is an assault on democracy, and it violates all of our values.\u201d<\/p>\n
The congressional hearings — the one scheduled for Tuesday and two on Wednesday with the House and Senate intelligence committees — are part of broader investigations into Russian meddling in last year\u2019s presidential election, won by Republican Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is also conducting a separate probe into Russia\u2019s role in the campaign.<\/p>\n
Facebook\u2019s testimony portrays the company as shocked about Russian use of its platform for political means. For the world\u2019s largest social network, the hearings mark the culmination of a weeks-long communication offensive with legislators, including blog posts, executive outreach and the hiring of crisis public relations firms.<\/p>\n
Google and Twitter have been less aggressive about their outreach to Washington, but both called the manipulative behavior by a foreign government unacceptable and pledged to fight it in the future.<\/p>\n
All three companies take pains to explain how small the Russian activity was in relation to what was happening overall on their platforms. Twitter\u2019s testimony will say it found that tweets generated by Russian-linked, automated accounts made up 0.74% of all of the election-related tweets on Twitter from Sept. 1, 2016, to Nov. 15, 2016.<\/p>\n
Those tweets received 0.33% of all the impressions on election-related tweets. For Facebook, even though 126 million people may have seen an IRA post at some point during a two-year period, it equals about four-thousandths of 1% of the content in the News Feed.<\/p>\n
Facebook\u2019s testimony starts with an explanation of how its News Feed and advertising operations work, and then goes into detail about how the Internet Research Agency\u2019s actions affected its audience.<\/p>\n
The company emphasizes work it did to secure its platform before the election, including taking down 5.8 million fake Facebook accounts in October 2016, the month before the election.<\/p>\n
The company also said it detected and mitigated Russia\u2019s spread of hacked information on its platform ahead of the election, which was “aimed at employees of major US political parties.”<\/p>\n
The Menlo Park, California-based company later plans to explain how it will work to block new fake accounts, including by requiring political advertisers to provide more documentation about their identities.<\/p>\n
Facebook doesn\u2019t explicitly endorse any legislation, but says, \u201cwe\u2019re taking steps where we can on our own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google and Twitter also plan to highlight steps they\u2019ve taken since the election to fight similar meddling in the future, such as identifying and shutting down fake accounts, blocking email phishing attempts, greater advertising disclosures and other methods.<\/p>\n