(Bloomberg) — Executives from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google’s YouTube told U.S. lawmakers they are combating disinformation on a range of subjects including the 2020 election and have taken down videos, posts and messages deemed false and a risk to health and safety.
YouTube has removed 200,000 videos and more than 100 million advertisements in an effort to stem disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and prevent advertisers from profiting, Richard Salgado, the director of law enforcement and information security at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, said Thursday in prepared testimony for a House Intelligence Committee hearing.
Twitter has tracked the threat of disinformation related to recent protests on racism and police brutality spurred by the death last month of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, said Nick Pickles, director of global public policy strategy and development.
“The public conversation on Twitter has highlighted the deep-rooted nature of issues related to race, justice, and equality,” Pickles said, according to prepared testimony. “While we have not seen evidence of concerted foreign state-backed efforts to manipulate the public conversation in recent weeks, we remain vigilant.”
Similarly, Facebook hasn’t found evidence of this, but it has seen fraudsters and financially motivated scammers seek to profit from the protests — for example by selling “non-existent T-shirts” to protesters, said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy.
As the hearing was underway, Facebook said it removed posts and ads by Donald Trump’s campaign team that associated an upside-down triangle — a symbol Nazis used to identify political prisoners — with Antifa. “We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,” Facebook said in a statement. “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, scheduled the hearing to focus on the influence of foreign actors on the social networks. In his prepared opening remarks, he cited threats of manipulation from Russia, China and Iran and asked: “Will your companies be able to keep up?” He voiced concern that “the nature of your platforms, all of them, is to embrace and monetize virality. The more sensational, the more divisive, the more shocking or emotionally charged, the faster it circulates.”
Each of the platforms described what they are doing to try to curb disinformation ahead of the 2020 election. For example, Google is building on training about email and campaign website security that it provided to 1,000 campaign professionals, as well as the eight major Republican and Democratic political committees, Salgado said.
Facebook currently has 35,000 people working on safety and security — three times the number in 2017 — according to Gleicher. The company has studied the conversation on Facebook surrounding 200 elections around the world as it prepares for November, he said.
Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut, criticized Facebook’s algorithm for promoting “polarization, division and anger” in order to increase engagement. “When this republic dies, it doesn’t happen because the Russians broke into Ohio voting machines or they managed to buy ads on Facebook or Twitter. It happens because our politics becomes so toxic, so polarized that we don’t recognize each other any more as Americans,” Himes said. “If every single American household is full of toxic, explosive gas, as I think it is today, all it takes is a match from Russia, or Iran, or North Korea, or from China to set off a conflagration.”
When Facebook’s Gleicher disputed the claim, Himes went on to request data to back that up.
Meanwhile, Schiff characterized Google’s reputation as one of “keeping its head down and avoiding attention to its platform while others draw heat” — a claim that the company disputed in the hearing.
The representatives from Twitter and Facebook testified that they have seen bad actors evolve their disinformation tactics over time. Twitter has witnessed the use of state-controlled media and government accounts to influence U.S. opinion on both coronavirus and the protests — for example, “Chinese actors comparing the police response in the United States to recent protests with the policing response in Hong Kong,” Pickles said.
“That shift from platform manipulation to overt state assets is something we’ve observed,” he added. “We have to keep one step ahead of and keep looking at how bad actors change their behavior.”
(Updates with details from hearing starting in fifth paragraph.)
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