U.S. lawmakers demanded that technology firms do more to fight “shocking” foreign efforts to influence U.S. politics on Wednesday, a day after Facebook identified a new influence campaign tied to November’s elections and despite President Donald Trump’s denunciation of the issue as a “hoax.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee has called executives of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google to testify on Sept. 5 “to hear the plans they have in place, to press them to do more, and to work together to address this challenge,” Senator Mark Warner, the panel’s Democratic vice chairman, said at a hearing.
“All the evidence this committee has seen to date suggests that the platform companies - namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google and YouTube - still have a lot of work to do,” Warner said.
Technology executives have traveled to Washington several times to testify in Congress over the past year, including 10 hours of questioning of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg over two days in April.
The committee has been looking into reported Russian efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that entities backed by the Kremlin had sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.
Moscow denies involvement.
Facebook said on Tuesday it had removed 32 pages and fake accounts from its platforms in a bid to combat foreign meddling ahead of November’s U.S. congressional elections.
Facebook stopped short of identifying the source of the misinformation. But members of Congress said it was clear Russia was involved.
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(Published by Reuters, Aug 01, 2018)