Russia Investigation Has Tech Giants Shying From ‘Social’ Label<br />“The bigger issue is that some of these tools are used to divide people, to manipulate people, to get fake news to people in broad numbers,<br />and so to influence their thinking,” said Mr. Cook in an interview with NBC News.<br />But as social media has become increasingly connected to unpleasant bickering, race-baiting<br />and Russian propaganda, the must-have “social” label has become an albatross, said Joseph Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who focuses on social networks.<br />There also were short-lived efforts like Google Buzz<br />and Google Wave, or geographically specific sites like Orkut — popular in Brazil but ignored elsewhere.<br />Many of those videos had only a small number of views, though they were “frequently posted to other social media platforms,” Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel in law enforcement<br />and information security, told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.<br />“The mere fact that a tech company is trying to minimize its overall influence is a telling signal of the moment we’re in,” said Mr. Bayer.<br />“Without sufficient oversight, these companies never imagined hostile intelligence services would misuse their<br />platforms in this way,” said Renee DiResta, an independent security researcher at Data for Democracy.<br />Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive and an outspoken critic of the data-collection practices of his company’s technological rivals, said Wednesday<br />that he was concerned that social networks could be weaponized against the people who use them.<br />Google said accounts believed to have ties to the Kremlin had uploaded more than 1,100 videos to YouTube on racial, religious and political topics.
