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US senators on Tuesday pressed Facebook Inc's chief lawyer on why the company did not catch 2016 election ads bought using Russian rubles, why its investigation of them took so long and how much it knows about its 5 million advertisers.
“In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens. There are signals we missed,” Stretch said under questioning from Democratic Senator Al Franken about how the company missed political ads bought with Russian money. Stretch called the Russia-based ads “reprehensible” for their political divisiveness.
The hearing marked the first time tech executives have appeared publicly before US lawmakers on the Russia matter, and the tone represented a dramatic shift in fortunes for Silicon Valley, which for years has grown accustomed to favorable regulatory treatment in the United States.
Facebook has broader reach than the smaller Twitter network, and it offers more powerful targeting capabilities than Google. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told Stretch, who responded that Facebook was committed to rooting out accounts that use fake names:
Lawyers for the three companies were scheduled to return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for two more hearings on Russia ad spending.
Facebook, in a series of disclosures over two months, has said that people in Russia bought at least 3,000 US political ads and published another 80,000 Facebook posts that were seen by as many as 126 million Americans over two years.
Senators said they could not understand the timing of Facebook's disclosures. Democratic Senator Chris Coons asked:
Stretch responded that, when US spy agencies alleged in January that Russians meddled in last year's election, "we weren't sitting around." The company over the following months launched an investigation and reported the results, he said.
It said it is hiring 1,000 more people to review ads, compiling a publicly searchable archive of political ads beginning next year and requiring more information about the identity of election advertisers.
Coons said he wished the tech companies had sent their top executives on Tuesday rather than in-house lawyers.
Kennedy asked Stretch:
"You've got 5 million advertisers and you're going to tell me that you're able to trace the origin of all those advertisements?"
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the crime subcommittee, said he wanted to help the tech companies, but he also pressed Stretch on whether Iran and North Korea could try to do what Russia did in the United States.
Stretch responded: "Certainly potentially. The internet is border-less."
The companies have responded with proposals for self-regulation, saying they would create their own public archives of election-related ads.
Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar told witnesses on Tuesday that self-regulation would lead to a "patchwork" of databases and that a uniform system would be better for voters.
(This story has been published in an arrangement with Reuters)
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