Kennedy is back.

He asks Stretch if FB can generate lists of teenagers who think they’re overweight.

Stretch says no.

Kennedy refers to a media report about FB micro-targeting teens during moments of emotional vulnerability.

Stretch: That reporting “relied on an internal document that was overstated...”

Kennedy: You have the ability to give me a list of people... who are teenagers who are insecure about their weight... just like I believe that you have the ability to go look at senator Graham’s or me, my profile... can you not?

Stretch: We have architected our system so that I may not.

Kennedy: But you could if you wanted to?

Stretch: It is precisely because blah blah

Kennedy: I’m saying if you wanted to, is it not the case that you can go to John Kennedy’s profile and see things about JK as a result of my activity on FB...

Stretch: Any user could navigate to your profile.

That line of questioning kind of went nowhere.

Franken challenges Salgado and they kind of talk past each other.

Franken turns again to Stretch. He asks about ad targeting for the topic “jew hater” on FB. FB has removed the topic from the ad platform. But how could such categories be generated and allowed to exist.

Did you not know about “jew hater” ad targeting until the media told you?

Stretch: “Senator, these categories which of course deeply offensive... were algorithmically generated... we’re not aware of evidence that they were used.... we don’t know for certain that they were never used... we’re not aware of any revenue that was generated using that ad target...”

Franken’s back. Can Twitter and Google vow not to take foreign political ads paid for with foreign money?

Twitter’s Edgett: Sure.

Google’s Salgado: I want to check to make sure it’s a good signal.

Graham: Are any of you in the content business?

Stretch: The vast vast majority of content on the platform is user-generated.

Edgett: We’re not in the content business.

Salgado: We’re not in the content business.

Senator Hirono: Can you say that content on your platform did not have some kind of effect on the election?

Stretch: “We’re not well positioned to judge why any one person or an entire electorate voted as it did.”

Senator Al Franken is up. “This is something you guys have to deal with and fix,” he says.

Then he mixes it up pretty good with FB’s Stretch.

Franken: “How did FB which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points... somehow not make the connection that electoral ads paid for in rubles were coming from Russia? Those are two data points. American political ads and Russian money, rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”

Stretch says the question of account compromise was “a threat our security team was intensely focused on.. in hindsight we should have had a broader lens...”

Franken: “OK, people are buying ads on your platform with rubles... you can’t put together rubles with a political ad and go like, ‘hm, those two data points spell out something bad.’”

Stretch: We should have..

Franken: Ok OK OK. ...Will FB commit to not accepting political ads in the future paid for in rubles or say the North Korean won?

Stretch: We’re not going to permit political advertising by foreign actors.

Stretch: ‘Our goal is to...

Franken: ‘My goal is to get you to think through this stuff a little bit better!’

Senator Patrick Leahy says “I hear a lot of johnny-come-latelys.” There’s a lot that I think you could have done earlier, he says. He bets that the companies made lots of add dollars.

Senator Ted Cruz accuses Google and Facebook of serving readers a disproportionate amount of “liberal” news stories and of excluding “conservative outlets.”

“It is disconcerting if those political positions become a lens through which American consumers consume news,” Cruz says. “Do you consider your sites to be neutral public fora?”

Stretch: “We think of FB as a platform for all ideas...”

Edgett: “Free expression and free speech is at the core of the twitter mission...”

Senator Coons brought a poster-size imposter FB ad targeting Clinton in the name of veterans. He asks Stretch about it.

Stretch:

Senator, that advertisement has no place on Facebook, and we are committed to preventing that sort of behavior... it makes me angry, it makes everyone at our company angry.

Why has it taken FB 11 months to come forward and help us understand the scope of this problem.. when former President Obama cautioned [Zuckerberg] nine days after the election?

Stretch says Facebook has redoubled “our efforts to understand what we now see as a sophisticated and systemic effort to interfere in the election.” As evidence he brandishes an April white paper. But the Wall Street Journal reported that FB removed references to Russia in the paper. Seems like less than total transparency.

Senator Klobuchar asks for support for an ad transparency bill... which she doesn’t quite get.

Then Kennedy asks Google if they’re a tech platform or a media company. That’s an easy one. Tech platform, says Salgado. But Kennedy, who is on fire, asks Salgado if Google delivers news (and makes decisions about what news people see?) – isn’t that what a newspaper does? Salgado insists that Google is not a media company.

Kennedy further challenges Stretch on what FB knows about the average user. Stretch insists the company is blind to certain details.

Stretch insists there are limits to what the company knows about its users.

That’s your testimony under oath? Kennedy asks.

Yup.

Here’s senator Dick Durbin. He tells Stretch anti-bias organization have raised the alarm about Russia-backed pages spreading bigoted messages. He accuses Facebook of providing consultant help to an “anti-Muslim effort.”

Stretch says the content they’ve turned over “is vile, and it’s vile for precisely the reason you say. It’s particularly exploitative.... [of] groups that have every reason to expect us to protect the authenticity of the debate on FB... we are reviewing and tightening our ad policies.”

Facebook’s Stretch says they have 10,000 people working on safety and security and they’ll double that number by 2018.

Edgett on how Twitter polices content: “We have a very respected trust and safety team.”

Senator Sasse asks for Twitter numbers. Edgett says 330m monthly active users (guilty!).

Feinstein whispers, did he say 330m! Hot mic.

Less than 5% are automated, Edgett says. “We look at whether it looks like there is a human behind it or not..” but people can use synonyms so it’s tricky.

Sasse says on politics Twitter it’s obvious people have fake followers. Can Twitter tell how much of traffic around a Tweet is automated?

Edgett says yes Twitter “prioritizes automated activity.” To weed out “malicious and automated” content, “what’s not actually realy.”

He says Twitter is getting closer to being able to tell “What a real human tweets versus what a robot tweets.”

Edgett thanks Feinstein for asking him what an “impression” on Twitter is. “So we’re all on the same page,” he says.

And none of them seem to be feeling much pressure, either.

Salgado is asked why RT was allowed to participate in a preferred status ads program and he simply blames “algorithms”.

Feinstein asks about Facebook’s custom audiences tool. Can FB explain who was targeted with the tool?
Stretch says the content is “imitative of social causes” which “is what makes the content to vile, so upsetting so cynical, its attempt to aggravate divisions in our society.”

He describes “broad geographic targeting” – 75% targeted USA as a whole, 25% targeted to states. And “they were targeted to interest groups.”

Has FB tweaked the tool?

Stretch says “we’re making a number of changes to our ad targeting policies” including stopping hate speech and sensitive tagging and tightening standards with divisive ads to make sure they’re not targeting particular communities or individuals.

Stretch says Facebook is working broadly in questions of authenticity on its platform.

What they’ve learned has helped them create new automated tools, he says.

Stretch says “We have produced [turned over to Congress] everything that we have identified that is the product of what we call coordinated inauthentic activity.”

But he doesn’t say he’s sure they ID’d all of the accounts.

Stretch says the internal investigation “continues and we expect to keep the committee up to date on any further discoveries.”

Grassley: OK.

Edgett: The same goes for Twitter.

Salgado: For Google the answer is similar.

Grassley: OK.

Edgett of Twitter says it’s a problem to get to know your client. “Who is running an ad, who is paying?” Who are they targeting?

“We’re working on the best approach to getting to know the clients... who are signing up for advertising.”

Whitehouse asks the witnesses what they’re doing to fix it and what success looks like.

They agree to submit testimony on it.

Stretch says the activity is focused on hot-button topics inflaming discourse.

“Approximately 90% of the volume we saw on the ad side was issues-based.”

“In terms of the total volume of material on the site it’s small...”

Stretch says FB has been tracking foreign actors since before and after the election.

“Following the election, the activity we’ve seen really continued, in the sense that... this concerted effort to sow division and discord... In the wake.. we saw a lot of activity... fomenting discord about the validity of his election... it continued until we disabled the accounts.”

Twitter: “These automated accounts continued.”

Edgett, of Twitter, says the accounts come ‘disproportionately’ out of Russia.

Graham starts. Other than Russia, he says, what nations are you concerned about tampering in elections?

Stretch says threat actors tied to nation states around the world. He’s going jargony.

“It’s really only recently that we’ve seen this threat evolve into... dissemination of misinformation.”

Salgado seeks to draw a line between Google and the other two companies:

“Google’s products don’t lend themselves to the kind of targeting or viral dissemination that the attackers seem to prefer.”

He says the company is carrying out new safeguards on election ads.

Now it’s Richard Salgado, director of law enforcement and infosec at Google.

He used to be at the justice department, focusing on hacking.

“We recognize ... that our services can be misused. State-sponsored attackers can be particularly pernicious... they are difficult to recognize.”

They’ve been working for a long time on the threat, he says.

YouTube stops people from artificially inflate view counts, for example. As for 2016, were foreign entities disseminating information to interfere in the election?

They reviewed ads from June 15 2016 through the election. “We found two accounts that appeared to be engaged in activity... spent roughly $4,700 in connection with the 2016 election.

On YouTube 18 channels with 1,100 videos uploaded by suspects that contained political content. Just 3% had more than 1,000 views.

Relatively small but “we understand that any misuse... can be very serious.”

The YT videos weren’t targeted but links were posted elsewhere.

Edgett says they’re working “to make sure the experience of 2016 never happens again.” Holler?

Twitter is up next. “We are troubled by reports that the power of Twitter was misused by a foreign actor...” to tamper in the election,

Edgett calls it “a new challenge for us and one that we are determined to meet.”

Twitter is working to understand what happened and to stop it from happening again, he says.

Twitter has a review “under way” to ID all the Russian shadow accounts, he says.

“Our findings may be supplemented as we work with committee staff...”

He says they studied tweets from 1 September to 15 November 2016.

The number of accounts was small, he says. 1/3 of 1% of election-related tweets came from Russian bots, Edgett says.

Advertising by RT and Sputnik violated policy and has been banned, he says.

He says again that Twitter has changed ad policies and safety policies.

Nothing we didn’t already know.

Senator Feinstein said she had a briefing last week and saw “really for the first time how Russia has harnessed... the frightening-to-me power of social media” including by using “fake accounts” to manipulate opinion.

“How easily and successfully they turned modern technologies to their advantage,” Feinstein says. She says that’s not widely recognized yet.

Feinstein says the committee has documents confirming the Russian tampering, including 470 FB pages and more than 3,000 paid ads that sought to sow discord and amplify racial and social divisions; 2,752 imposter Twitter accounts and 37,000 Russian bots; and more.

Feinstein says she wants to know what’s going on and what the tech companies are prepared to do to stop it.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is up. He uses the phrase “Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election,” which Graham, who recently became a bosom golfing buddy of Trump, did not.

“To those who wish to undermine American life, they found portals into our society that are intermingled with everyday life,” Graham says. Well put.

Graham says we have to be on our guard as a nation against people who would use this technology against us and calls it the “national security challenge of the 21st century.”

“The purpose of this hearing is to figure out how we can help you,” Graham says.

Oh.

He says he thinks the tech companies are taking the problem seriously.

Graham says Trump said “from his point of view social media was an invaluable tool to help him win an election.”

All politicians and millions of Americans “use your technology,” Graham says. “You’ve enriched America.”

He jokes that “some people” should probably do less expressing themselves “in 140 characters.” Whose ears are burning.

OK the witnesses are in their chairs and Republican Lindsey Graham, who’s running the show along with ranking member Dianne Feinstein, looks ready to begin.

In this blog we’ll consider how Russian tampering on social platforms in the 2016 election was carried out by online imposters and totally missed by the platform hosts. We’ll see how bad the hosts now feel about it all, if they do.

But another pot in the Trump-Russia affair has been simmering this week, with the announcement Monday that a former senior adviser to Trump had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, with whom he is now cooperating. Trump’s former campaign chairman and a deputy were separately charged.

You can read about the latest developments here:

Do you think the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives to tamper in the 2016 US presidential election?

Your answer may reveal your party identity, more than anything. While a majority of the American public now believes that Russia tried to disrupt the US election, opinions about Trump campaign involvement tend to split along partisan lines: 73% of Republicans, but only 13% of Democrats, believe Trump did “nothing wrong” in his dealings with Russia and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This is off-topic but with a half hour to go till we’re underway and a national holiday to observe, here’s George HW Bush reviewing Halloween costumes from the back of a train: