This week, legal representatives from Facebook and Twitter testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the role of Russian actors in the 2016 election. Democrat senators used the hearing as an opportunity to showboat, and grill those representatives about their lack of action in combating “Russian fake news.”
There was one part during the course of the testimony where it was revealed by the Facebook and Twitter representatives that Russian-linked posts and advertisements placed on the networks after Election Day sought to sow doubt… about Donald Trump’s victory. That was revealed by Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch.
Sen. Lindsey Graham inquired: “During the election, they were trying to create discord between Americans, most of it directed against Clinton. After the election you saw Russian-tied groups and organizations trying to undermine President Trump’s legitimacy. Is that what you saw on Facebook?”
Stretch and his Twitter counterpart, Sean Edgett, called that an “accurate” statement.
Democrat Sen. Al Fraken still found it appropriate to roast the two, asking, “Mr. Stretch, how did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them into personal connections for its users, somehow not make the connection that election ads, paid for in rubles, were coming from Russia? Those are two data points: American political ads and Russian money, rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”
Good question, but Franken is a dumb-dumb if he actually thinks Facebook as a company can monitor trillions of interactions on its platform every single day.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Twitter actively censored conservative accounts during the 2016 election, which had a much larger effect than a group of Russian trolls spending a minuscule amount of money on ads.
According to Breitbart, “Twitter ‘hid’ nearly 50 percent of tweets bearing the hashtag #DNCLeak along with a quarter of those with #PodestaEmails during the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign. Edgett said that Twitter systems concealed substantial numbers of tweets relating to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee as well as from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, despite the fact that it knew that only a tiny percentage of these could have even ‘potential links to Russia.'”
Oh, but it gets worse: “‘We found that slightly under 4% of Tweets containing #PodestaEmails came from accounts with potential links to Russia,’ Edgett said in his written testimony, whereas of tweets bearing the #DNCLeak, ‘roughly 2% were from potentially Russian-linked accounts,’ he said.”
Then the kicker: “Despite the low correlation between those hashtags and possible Russian involvement, Twitter hid 48 percent of tweets with the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets with #PodestaEmails, Edgett said.”
They don’t seem to be getting any flack from Democrats for using their platform to benefit them. I wonder why that is…
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