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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the thorny-questions dept.

The bloom is off the rose:

It was about an hour and a half into a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee when Sen. Dianne Feinstein laid into Facebook, Google and Twitter.

"I don't think you get it," she began. "You bear this responsibility. You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will."

The tech giants were being grilled by Congress over Russian trolls abusing their services to meddle in last year's US election, and the California Democratic lawmaker had had it.

It was just one of very public tongue-lashings the Silicon Valley companies received over the course of three marathon congressional panels last month, held over a two-day span. The hearings were anticlimactic, in part because the three companies only sent their general counsels instead of their famous CEOs -- a point several lawmakers bemoaned during the public questioning.

Is it Google, Twitter, and Facebook who don't get it, or Senators like Dianne Feinstein who don't get it?


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  • (Score: 1) by terrab0t on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:12PM (2 children)

    by terrab0t (4674) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:12PM (#606437)

    Based on how ridiculous the ads shown to the public [esquire.com] are, any influence this Russian troll farm had on the US election is hypothetical. These ads are trash. Whoever paid for them got ripped off.

    Maybe some competent people could influence an election using social media in the future, but that hasn’t happened yet.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:29PM (#606449)

    Nice try, Boris!

  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:31PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:31PM (#606455)

    Based on how ridiculous the ads shown to the public are, any influence this Russian troll farm had on the US election is hypothetical. These ads are trash. Whoever paid for them got ripped off.

    Except they did work. They were endlessly shared by those favoring those positions, and the comments in those shared posts indicate there was a great deal of belief in what was posted. What's more, searching for the truth about any such posts required first wading through pages of search results showing various blogs repeating the messages. They were not aimed at those to whom critical thinking is an important factor in their lives.