WASHINGTON (CN) – As social media giants open up about the exploitation of their platforms by Russian agents trying to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, new research is compounding criticism of businesses like Facebook and Twitter by lawmakers.
"These are the most sophisticated, adaptive, innovative companies in the world who are basically trying to make us believe they have no idea how to fix any of this, which is just garbage," said Molly McKew, a political consultant who specializes in information warfare and U.S.-Russian relations.
Several members of Congress made similar proclamations last week at a Senate subcommittee hearing on crime and terrorism inspired by recent revelations about the foreign-generated content that flooded Facebook, Google and Twitter last fall.
While Facebook reported that up to 126 million users scrolled through content circulated by Russian operatives, Google found just over 1,000 videos – 43 hours of content – connected to Russian influencers, and Twitter revealed that 2,752 profiles were controlled by the Russian firm Internet Research Agency. Twitter also counted 1.4 million propaganda-based tweets during the 2016 election from at least 36,000 automated “bots.”
At Tuesday’s hearing, members of Congress voiced frustration at how long it took for the companies to disclose these statistics.
Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda meanwhile says the problem is much more widespread than the companies have let on. On Sept. 28 the institute reported that the presidential election saw disinformation and factual content circulating on social-media platforms at a 1:1 ratio.
Oxford researcher Lisa-Maria Neudert called it unsurprising in an interview that Facebook had to revise an earlier estimate that just 10 million users saw Russian-generated content.
"What does surprise me, in light of the significant scale, is how slowly investigations are proceeding and how difficult it seems to be to produce data evidence of Russian election hacking," Neudert said in an interview.
When asked whether Facebook could be manipulated to steer the election last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously dismissed the notion as "crazy." The company even reported as recently as summer 2017 that it had found no evidence of election meddling.
"I'm surprised how the political potential could have gone unnoticed," Neudert said.
McKew has questions as well about why the companies are characterizing the threat of foreign interference as a new challenge.
As adviser to the president of Georgia from 2009 to 2012, McKew helped the country sandwiched between Russia and Turkey to counter a campaign of disinformation on the heels of a five-day war sparked by Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia in 2008.
"There's a lot that they could do to document coordination, to document origin, to document everything else,” McKew said of the tech companies in a phone interview. “But certainly it seems like they're pretending that's not possible."
McKew noted that social media companies rely on algorithms for the express purpose of keeping users engaged so they can promote content and drive advertising.
"They knew exactly what they were doing because they were selling this to people," she said.
Facebook has not responded to a request for an interview. Google meanwhile declined to comment beyond its Oct. 30 blog post about its commitment to stopping the abuse of its platform, and Twitter declined to comment beyond what the company’s general counsel Sean Edgett said during congressional testimony last week.