META Meta Platforms Inc

A Wall Street Journal Roundup 

Congress on Thursday published responses from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google to questions about how Russian actors used their platforms to spread misinformation before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The responses address issues including whether there is any evidence of collusion between the Russian parties and the Trump campaign, and how Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., is handling its commercial transactions with a Russian broadcaster that federal intelligence agencies say is a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin.

The responses, which were submitted to Congress in recent weeks, are an extension of answers that executives from the three companies gave in hours of testimony last year. Here are highlights, including which important questions the companies didn't answer:

Facebook:

--The Internet Research Agency, a so-called Russian troll farm, used Facebook's tools to promote rallies, protests and other events across the U.S. that cut across ideological lines. In the responses published Thursday, Facebook said 13 of the pages created by IRA attempted to organize 129 events, about twice what The Wall Street Journal tracked down this fall through archived versions of pages. The events were viewed by 338,300 unique Facebook accounts, the company said. Facebook said about 62,500 marked they were attending one of the events and 25,800 accounts marked they were interested.

--Facebook gave different responses to questions from two lawmakers about whether there was evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian-backed actors. In one set of answers, the company said it found "what appears to be insignificant overlap" between the ad-targeting criteria and content used by the IRA and that used by the Trump campaign. In another set of responses, Facebook said it can't "substantiate or disprove allegations of possible collusion." Facebook also said that it had no evidence that the IRA used U.S. voter registration data to target ads on the platform.

--Last year, the Journal reported that the Russian government was using software made by Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab to scan computers around the world. In its responses, Facebook said it stopped using one Kaspersky antivirus products in October 2017 and is in the process of "phasing out" another antivirus product used internally that doesn't transmit data back to Kaspersky. Facebook intends to continue use of a "Kaspersky service that provides us with information about threat activity as a one-way feed."

-- Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) asked Facebook if it had seen any evidence of state-sponsored manipulation in U.S. elections last year, including gubernatorial races New Jersey and Virginia. Facebook didn't directly answer the question, instead detailing how it has learned and changed since the 2016 election cycle.

--Deepa Seetharaman

Twitter:

--Twitter gave its justification for why researchers estimate 10% to 15% of accounts on Twitter are spam, while Twitter itself says fewer than 5% of accounts on its platform are spam. Twitter said its own researchers have access to data about its users, such as email addresses and phone numbers, that outside researchers don't get -- and that this data helps Twitter tally spam accounts. Twitter also said outside researchers sometimes count accounts as spam that Twitter removes.

--Twitter defended its practice of not alerting users when they are interacting with bot accounts. A label for bot accounts would be too broad, Twitter said, because it might inadvertently include nonmalicious activity, such as scheduled Twitter posts by humans, and emergency notifications. Investigators, however, didn't say such a label would necessarily indicate content is malicious.

--Twitter said a partnership among tech companies called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism now includes a database of 40,000 digitized fingerprints used to identify violent terrorist imagery and recruitment videos. The group started with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Microsoft Corp., and now also includes Snap Inc., Microsoft's LinkedIn and others.

--Georgia Wells

Google:

--RT, the Russian state news agency that federal intelligence officials have called "the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet," uses Google's YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as primary distributors of its content. Google told the Senate that it now describes RT's relationship with the Russian government in search results and that it is "working on disclosures to provide similar transparency on YouTube." A Google search result for "RT" on Thursday noted it is funded by the Russian government, but search results that linked to RT articles didn't include such a disclosure.

--One issue that is still unclear is how much Google and RT have earned together on ads running before RT's YouTube videos begin playing. As of late last year, RT had amassed 5.5 billion views on YouTube and was part of the site's package of premium channels for advertisers. YouTube has since removed RT from that package, but still runs ads on its videos. Sen. Harris asked Google how much revenue it earned on ads "that accompanied Russian propaganda." Google responded it paid less than $35 to Russian actors who posted videos on YouTube -- but it didn't disclose revenue for RT.

--Google said Russian actors that bought $4,700 worth of ads around the election didn't "narrowly" target those ads to specific groups of users, including by geography or political affiliation.

--Google said in its responses that it hadn't detected installation of Kaspersky products on its systems.

--Jack Nicas

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 25, 2018 21:54 ET (02:54 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.