It would be a serious understatement to say that much has changed in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. campaign. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that serious mistakes were made by each of the social media companies – as they were by the entire U.S. government.
Both Facebook and Twitter failed to anticipate how their platforms could be manipulated and misused. Like the federal government, they were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election by Russian-backed operatives.
Even after the election, the social media companies were reluctant to admit there even was a problem.
It took the pressure that was brought to bear by the Intelligence Committee to get Facebook, Twitter, and Google to uncover the malicious activities of the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency on their platforms.
In the time since, each of the social media companies has come a long way towards recognizing the threat.
The social media companies have identified and removed *some* of the bad actors on their platforms.
We have also seen important action by Facebook and Twitter to make political advertising more transparent by complying with the terms @AmyKlobuchar, John McCain, and I put forward in the #HonestAds Act.
The bad news, I’m afraid, is that there is a lot of work still to do.
