From Senator Burr

November 04, 2017

This week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence heard testimony from the General Counsels of Facebook, Twitter, and Google regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. It was the Committee’s 12th open hearing touching on Russia’s active measures targeting the United States. Nearly a year after the election, I still don’t believe the social media companies fully grasp the scope of Russian involvement on their platforms, but I look forward to hearing more from them about their efforts to prevent such activity in the future.

Many in the media have tried to reduce this conversation down to one premise: foreign actors conducted a surgically executed covert operation to help Donald Trump become President of the United States. I’m here to tell you: this story does not simplify that easily, and what we actually found was a very scattershot approach. For example, Maryland was targeted with five times more ads than Wisconsin, but Hillary Clinton won Maryland by 26 points. In short, it seems the Russians were more focused on creating societal chaos in America than tactically favoring Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. I understand the urge to make this story simple. It’s human nature to make the complex manageable, find explanations, and interpret things in ways that confirm your conclusions. But that’s bias.

As I’ve said before, this isn’t about relitigating the 2016 election. This is about national security and corporate responsibility.  The bottom line is that agents of a foreign power reached into the United States using our own social media platforms and conducted a misinformation operation intended to divide our society. As we look forward to the 2018 elections, I firmly believe the actions of these companies, with such incredible reach and influence, must catch up to their responsibilities.  We will continue to follow all threads of this investigation until we have a full picture of the scope of what occurred.

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All this Russia-gate nonsense is going to end up being an effort to censor social media. And it is not the right wing nuts that they will censor - nope, not at all. All over $100,000 worth of stupid ads on Facebook. I believe Facebook gets over $20 billion dollars a year in ads. 

Sure wish the USA would limit its interference in foreign elections to buying ads.