15 Things We Learned From the Tech Giants at the Senate Hearings
During three Congressional hearings spread over two days, we heard a lot of bluster from senators and pat answers from tech-company lawyers about the role their firms played in the 2016 election.
Scattered among all the questions, some new facts entered the public record. Here we attempt to catalog the important new information we learned. Some of the biggest disclosures came in the prepared testimony from Facebook, Twitter, and Google, as well as in the introduction from the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia.
- Russian electoral disinformation reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram. That’s 146 million total.
These topline numbers keep going up, and we hadn’t known that the influence campaign extended to Instagram. This information seems to have only reached the Senate committee in the last couple of days.
- Most Russian advertising on Facebook was used to build up pages, which then distributed their content “organically.”
The $100,000 of advertising that has
