News Of NYC Terror Attack Changes Focus Of Senate Social Media Hearing

Wayne Rash,

ANALYSIS: Experts on international terrorism turn from describing how terrorists use social media to reporting the level of chatter on Islamist networks

Each company representative explained that they had algorithms designed to filter out what Facebook calls non-authentic users. They also explained that they were trying to make advertising buys more transparent so that it would be obvious when ads were being placed by suspicious users.

During the questions that followed the presentations, Watts said that the abusive activities on social media continued unabated, despite the statements by the social media companies that they were doing their best to control them.

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NYC terror impact

Michael S. Smith, II, a terrorism analyst and International Security Program Fellow at New America, said that the big social media companies could do a lot more than they are now to prevent the misuse of their networks by terrorists and other state-sponsored actors, including the Russian Internet Research Agency, which was responsible for much of the disinformation activity conducted by the Kremlin over the past four years.

Smith said that the fact that the social networks allow the use of methods that make it impossible to determine the location of a user encourage the use by everyone from terrorists to Russian propagandists.

“To deter violations of its policies, such as defacing pages about high-profile public figures and issuing terroristic threats, the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia has blocked editorial controls for parties seeking to alter or add content to its popular site when using virtual private networks o mask their physical locations,” Smith explained. He suggested that at a minimum, Facebook, Twitter and other sites could do the same.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) asked why it was so hard for organizations such as Facebook to pick up on Russian activities, noting that it should be pretty obvious when someone paid for a political ad in Rubles. Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, was not able to provide an answer.

However, Stretch provided new information on the nature of Russian activities on Facebook involving political ads and with issue advertising. He said that the Russian activities did target candidate Hillary Clinton, but that most of the ads were designed to spread dissention and undermine trust in democracy. He also said that following the election, the Russian activities shifted to ads attempting to create doubt about the newly-elected Donald Trump’s legitimacy.

 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) mentioned several times a bill she’s promoting that would require social media companies to be more transparent. She said that issue advertising in particular, not just political ads, needed to be more transparent. However, Klobuchar’s questions made it clear that she didn’t grasp the scale of advertising on social media, comparing it with the advertising at a small local television station.

Stretch said that Facebook now believes that at least 127 million Americans saw content produced by the Russian Internet Research Agency, most of it issue advertising designed to be as divisive as possible.

Currently the terrorism experts are calling for legislation that would place some controls on how groups can gain influence via social media by making some activities illegal, while protecting social media companies from charges of censorship.

Many of the senators at the hearing are also looking for some way to craft legislation. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how that may happen since it was apparent during the hearing that they had limited knowledge of about the services they’re trying to regulate.

Originally published on eWeek