Senate Intel Committee: Digital's Big 3 Expected To Testify Nov. 1 In Public Hearing
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, October 4, 2017
The Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian influence of the U.S. elections, government collusion and ongoing Russian “active measures,” has invited the Big 3 digital/social media platforms -- Facebook, Twitter and Google -- to provide public testimony during an open hearing on Nov. 1, the committee chairs said during a press briefing Wednesday afternoon.
One of the issues the committee has been probing is the purchase of ads on social media platforms by Russian operatives, but it would not release the examples provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google.
However, Co-Chair Mark Warner said the committee is looking into issues surrounding the release of such ads during political campaign races “just like radio, TV or newspapers” allow.
“You can at least get a look at that content" then, Warner said, alluding to traditional media's historical access to political ads.
Warner added that initially there was some question about investigating Facebook ads that were “only paid for with rubles,” but implied the investigation is not limited to media buys done via Russian currency.
While the committee does not plan to release the ads shared with them as part of the investigation, Warner said, “At the end of the day, I think it’s important that the public sees these ads.”
Warner added that as important as the Russian media buys on Facebook are, he believes an "even more problematic" issue was Russia's creation of "false accounts" on Facebook to drive unwitting users to "false stories" published on Facebook and elsewhere.
Regarding Facebook at least, these Russian ads, fake accounts and useless pages, sites had no impact. Based on stats provided so far, almost no one paid attention, and a considerable percentage of the paid ads were't even served to real people. So if Facebook has a problem here, it is in part that they may have to gently explain there was no impact from the ads, without leading clients to wonder about the real reach and im pact of Facebook ads on real world commerce. Also, Russia backed trolls got away with this because the platform is so automated. There has been no human intervention. That is a labor cost, and if Facebook will now hire 2,000 people as they say they will, it will be an added cost. It will also slow down the buying and delivery process in order to be effective. None of this is desirable for Facebook.
@Henry: Be specific. What are you basing your claim of "no impact" on? What "stats" are you referencing? The analysis provided by Senate Intel Committee co-chairs yesterday indicated it had an impact, and specifically in some key electoral states. Did you watch their briefing and access their report?
https://www.c-span.org/video/?435050-1/senate-russia-probe-expanded-looking-possible-collusion
Joe, the numbers on ads, purchase amount in dollars, delieverd versus not delivered and so on have been reported over the past few days (perhaps back into last week) in the Wall Street Journal, based on statements from Google. So I suppose the Senate staffers are playing catch up with this. If there is a problem, it's that this rerquires little money and effort to do. So the risk from failure (in this case, impact) is low.
@Henry: Fake Answer. You're not citing any specifics. Facebook has already disclosed that the Russian operatives placed 3,000 ads that were seen by 10 million people. If you're going to make claims like that, you should back them up with specifics about lack of "impact." By the way, what is your metric or KPI for that word? What is known is that the ads explicited targeted people in key swing states -- Michigan and Wisconsin, for example -- and we know the impact of that:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/politics/russian-facebook-ads-michigan-wisconsin/index.html