WATCH LIVE Facebook, Google & Twitter testifying NOW. (2nd day)

What to Watch for as Facebook, Twitter and Google Executives Testify on Capitol Hill


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Here is what to watch for:

The problem was worse than reported

Facebook, Twitter and Google have been slow to acknowledge their significance in the Russian influence campaign. Right after the election, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, scoffed at the idea that fake news on the site could have swayed public opinion ahead of the election.

It took months for the companies to launch their own investigations. In late September, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that information provided by Twitter and Facebook seemed to greatly underplay their problems.

In prepared remarks, Facebook said inflammatory posts by Russian agents intending to sow discord among Americans reached 126 million users. Google, whose information security director, Richard Salgado, will testify on Tuesday, said that the same agents, from the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, uploaded over 1,000 videos on Google’s YouTube service. Twitter said they published more 131,000 messages on Twitter.

And they admitted they were wading into new territory.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/politics/facebook-twitter-google-hearings-congress.html

How to watch Facebook, Google and Twitter testify to Congress about Russia and the 2016 election
The first of three hearings begins today.

Senior executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter will submit on Tuesday to the first of three grueling grillings before U.S. lawmakers who are investigating Russia’s suspected interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Kicking it off is the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top crime and terrorism panel, chaired by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The focus is on the extent to which Kremlin-backed agents and trolls sought to spread disinformation and extremist content on major social media platforms — and what, exactly, the U.S. Congress should do about it.

Representing Facebook at the hearing is Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel; from Google it’ll be Rich Salgado, the search giant’s director of law enforcement and information security; and standing in for Twitter is Sean Edgett, the company’s acting general counsel.

The hearing officially begins at 2:30 pm ET/11:30 am PT, and you can watch live here. We’ll update this post with embedded video once it becomes available.

Lawmakers on two other committees — the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — will press tech executives at two back-to-back hearings beginning tomorrow morning.

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/31/16570988/watch-live-stream-facebook-google-twitter-russia-trump-2016-presidential-election-senate