META Meta Platforms Inc

By Georgia Wells, Robert McMillan and Dustin Volz 

A Senate investigation of Russia's social-media influence criticized U.S. tech giants, with new attention on Google and YouTube, for helping spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential election and pushed them to better coordinate to prevent a repeat next year.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday, which bolsters previous investigations of Russian interference, recommends the Trump administration publicly underscore the danger of further outside meddling in 2020, and warns political campaigns to scrutinize social media posts before sharing them with supporters.

The report, the result of 2 1/2 years of investigation, didn't say that Russian propaganda influenced the election's outcome. But it said that Russian efforts were "overtly" and "almost invariably" supportive of Donald Trump to the detriment of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Those conclusions are in line with previous findings from the U.S. intelligence community and former special counsel Robert Mueller.

Senators also called out a litany of Silicon Valley names for their roles, including Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest and even the gaming app Pokémon Go. Previous Senate reports on Russian election efforts mostly focused on social-media sites such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

In Tuesday's report, senators described YouTube as "the propaganda vehicle of choice for Russia's state sponsored news organization, RT." And Google's search algorithm, the report said, "can elevate extremist content or disinformation to the top of certain searches." YouTube is a unit of Google, though the companies operate separately.

"Anyone who follows the information propaganda space knows that video is the next frontier," said Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies disinformation. "YouTube should be a primary area of focus."

A spokeswoman for Google, whose parent is Alphabet Inc., said the company has "invested significantly to detect phishing and hacking attempts, identify foreign interference and protect campaigns from digital attacks."

A Facebook spokesman said the company was bolstering its defenses.

A Twitter spokeswoman noted that the site prohibits state-controlled media, including Russia Today or RT, from advertising on its platform.

The report gave examples of how misinformation can spread. Days after the 2016 election, a falsified media account of President Trump having won the popular vote briefly ranked higher on Google than stories that accurately reflected the U.S. popular vote, which was won by Mrs. Clinton, according to the report.

On YouTube, the world's most popular video platform, Russian operatives focused overwhelmingly on influencing black voters to try to suppress their turnout and stoke racial divisions, the report said. Senators said this fact contradicted prior testimony from Google General Counsel Kent Walker that "videos were not targeted to any particular sector of the U.S. population."

Mr. Walker declined to comment through a spokeswoman. YouTube has made selling politically focused advertising a new priority this year.

The Senate report offered numerous recommendations for tech companies, government agencies and lawmakers to better guard against future attempts to use the internet against American voters.

The report also recommended that Congress consider ways to facilitate cooperation between social-media companies and government agencies, and encourage greater information sharing between the public and private sectors.

Privacy concerns have hampered efforts by big technology companies to share data with outside researchers, said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University professor who studies the effect of social media on democracy. Mr. Persily's project has been unable to do the kind of in-depth analysis of Facebook data it initially planned, he said, because Facebook has been unwilling to share data on individuals, citing privacy concerns.

The Senate report also ties Russia President Vladimir Putin to the propaganda campaign. The financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, and his relationship with Mr. Putin, "point to significant Kremlin support, authorization and direction of the IRA's operation and goals," the report said, referring to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian group behind election propaganda linked to Mr. Prigozhin.

The bipartisan report coincides with increasing concern about foreign influence in U.S. politics. Mr. Trump faces an impeachment inquiry stemming from a July call with the Ukrainian president during which he pressed Kyiv to investigate Joe Biden, a political rival. Democrats assert that the president abused the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference for help with his re-election.

Last week, Microsoft Corp. announced that suspected hackers linked to the Iranian government unsuccessfully attempted to infiltrate at least one email account associated with a U.S. presidential campaign.

Technology companies and federal agencies have made strides in collaborating on addressing foreign interference since the last presidential election. Those improvements paid off during the 2018 midterms, when Facebook and other platforms dismantled small networks of suspected foreign-backed disinformation accounts based on tips from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The report is the second of an expected five volumes to be released by the Senate Intelligence Committee from its investigation Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first, published in July, found the U.S. had made progress in securing its voting infrastructure since 2016 but that some election systems managed by states and counties remain vulnerable to attack in 2020.

The three next volumes will focus on the Obama administration's policy responses to Russia's interference, a review of the U.S. intelligence community's January 2017 assessment of Moscow's intentions behind the meddling, and questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn't start and didn't end with the 2016 election," said committee Chairman Richard Burr (R., N.C.).

Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the committee's top ranked Democrat, called for Congress to act. "We cannot expect social media companies to take adequate precautions on their own," he said.

--Rob Copeland contributed to this article.

Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com, Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 08, 2019 17:15 ET (21:15 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.