Ahead of Senate hearings that will see Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifying about foreign election interference, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has chimed in via an op-ed in the Washington Post. While we wait to watch the hearings in the morning, you can have a look at his essay, which is mostly a rehash of things we’ve been hearing about for months in terms of fighting fake accounts, fact checking hoaxes, tracking influence networks and the efforts it has made around elections in France, Germany, Mexico and Italy.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook has strengthened its defenses, but it remains to be seen how that will go over with members of Congress and the public. In closing, the CEO said “It’s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America’s democracy from outside interference.” Whether or not Facebook has done enough, if there are other weak points allowing for misinformation and propaganda — as researchers found when they were easily able to buy Google ads for Russian troll-inspired material using rubles and known IRA identities — it may not matter.
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