US senators are pressuring Facebook’s lawyers to give explanations about what happened during the last US presidential campaign and the influence of Russian agents, through the most popular social network in the world.
So far it is known that, during the presidential campaign, large sums of money coming from Russia were used to buy ads on Facebook.
Now, republican and, mostly, democrat congressmen, are trying to make Facebook give some reasonable explanation on how all this happened, and the company wasn’t aware, or maybe it was, and did nothing about it.
Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, said that, in retrospective, the company should have done more to avoid what ended up happening. “In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens,” said Facebook’s lawyer, Colin Stretch.
Even though Twitter and Google’s lawyers were also there, and many questions were asked to them, Facebook took the worst part.
“I bet your advertising department have seen an extraordinary increase of income thank to those adds”, said democrat Patrick Leahy to Facebook’s counselor.
Before Tuesday’s hearing, Facebook informed that content generated by Russia reached as many as 126 million users. The company admitted that Russians generated around 80,000 posts between 2015 and 2017.
When the republican senator Lindsey Graham asked Strecht if Iran or North Korea could do what Russia did, Facebook’s general counsel answered: “Potentially yes, Internet has no borders.”
