Some foreign students in U.S. schools find it challenging to submit grammatically correct, idiomatically accurate papers. So two former Ukrainian graduate students launched an artificial intelligence-driven grammar-proofing program that goes well beyond spell-check. Today, their 8-year-old startup, Grammarly, whose first venture round netted $110 million in May, has offices in Ukraine and the U.S. VOA Ukrainian Service correspondent Tatiana Vorozhko has the story.
…

Aerial surveillance can be an indispensable part of police or security work. But small police forces certainly can’t afford planes or helicopters to help them do their jobs. So increasingly, drones are filling the gap and providing eyes in the sky. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

The United Nations is set to host talks on the use of autonomous weapons, but those hoping for a ban on the machines dubbed “killer robots” will be disappointed, the ambassador leading the discussions said Friday.

More than 100 artificial intelligence entrepreneurs led by Tesla’s Elon Musk in August urged the U.N. to enforce a global ban on fully automated weapons, echoing calls from activists who have warned the machines will put civilians at enormous risk.

A U.N. disarmament grouping known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will on Monday begin five days of talks on the issue in Geneva.

But anything resembling a ban, or even a treaty, remains far off, said the Indian ambassador on disarmament, Amandeep Gill, who is chairing the meeting.

“It would be very easy to just legislate a ban but I think … rushing ahead in a very complex subject is not wise,” he told reporters. “We are just at the starting line.”

He said the discussion, which will also include civil society and technology companies, will be partly focused on understanding the types of weapons in the pipeline.

Proponents of a ban, including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots pressure group, insist that human beings must ultimately be responsible for the final decision to kill or destroy.

They argue that any weapons system that delegates the decision on an individual strike to an algorithm is by definition illegal, because computers cannot be held accountable under international humanitarian law.

Gill said there was agreement that “human beings have to remain responsible for decisions that involve life and death.”

But, he added, there are varying opinions on the mechanics through which “human control” must govern deadly weapons.

Machines ‘can’t apply the law’

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is mandated to safeguard the laws of conflict, has not called for a ban, but has underscored the need to place limits on autonomous weapons.

“Our bottom line is that machines can’t apply the law and you can’t transfer responsibility for legal decisions to machines,” Neil Davison of the ICRC’s arms unit told AFP.

He highlighted the problematic nature of weapons that involve major variables in terms of the timing or location of an attack — for example, something that is deployed for multiple hours and programmed to strike whenever it detects an enemy target.

“Where you have a degree of unpredictability or uncertainty in what’s going to happen when you activate this weapons system, then you are going to start to have problems for legal compliance,” he said.

Flawed meeting?

Next week’s U.N. meeting will also feature wide-ranging talks on artificial intelligence, triggering criticism that the CCW was drowning itself in discussions about new technologies instead of zeroing in on the urgent issue.

“There is a risk in going too broad at this moment,” said Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch, who is the coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

“The need is to focus on lethal autonomous weapons,” she told AFP.

The open letter co-signed by Musk as well as Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, warned that killer robots could become “weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

“Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” they said.
…

The results of three recent separate studies are staggering, the oceans are filled with about 5 trillion bits and bobs of plastic debris. Now, one English sailing team is doing its part, skimming plastic off the ocean’s surface, bucket by bucket. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

Bicycle highways, urban farms and local energy hubs — just some of the ways that yesterday’s smokestack cities are turning into tomorrow’s green spaces.

The Urban Transitions Alliance (UTA), a network that brings together cities in Germany, the United States and China, launched this week to help members learn regeneration tricks from each other.

“What to do with your brownfield sites, how to transition with citizens in mind, create new jobs — these cities have a lot of challenges in common,” said Roman Mendle, Smart Cities program manager at ICLEI, an international association of local governments.

As up to 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated in urban areas, cities have to play a leading role in addressing climate change.

Experts from more than 20 countries met in Essen, Germany, this week to launch the UTA and thrash out how post-industrial cities can reinvent themselves in plans that will be submitted to the U.N. climate talks in Bonn this week.

Essen, once a coal and steel city known as Germany’s “Graue Maus” (grey mouse) for its polluted air and waterways, has gained a reputation as a trailblazer for sustainability, becoming the European Commission’s European Green Capital 2017.

“There is a lot of know-how in Essen on how to transition from the age of carbon to a post-carbon world,” said Simone Raskob, Essen’s deputy mayor and head of its environment department.

“No city can do this by itself. There are a lot of challenges,” Raskob, who leads the European Green City – Essen 2017 project, told Reuters.

Experts praise Essen for cleaning up its waterways, creating green spaces and turning grimy industrial sites into dynamic cultural centers, such as the Zeche Zollverein, a towering UNESCO World Heritage site that arose from a disused coal mine.

To ease traffic congestion, Essen built Germany’s first bike highway, connecting with a 100-km (62-mile) regional network.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, once a dynamo of U.S. heavy industry, has shifted from a fossil fuel-based economy, reinventing itself as a hub for green buildings innovation and clean energy.

The former steel city has been switching over to LED street lights, retro-fitting municipal buildings for energy efficiency and developing district energy initiatives.

The city will also host the largest U.S. urban farm: 23 acres (9 hectares) on a site where low-income housing once stood.

“One of the key things we have recognized is that becoming greener also brings economic benefits,” said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer.

Founding UTA members include districts of Beijing and Shijiazhuang in China; Buffalo and Cincinnati in the United States; and Dortmund in Germany.
…

An Australian museum has teamed up with computer giant International Business Machines to count the country’s native frog population, and they want amphibian enthusiasts to jump on board.

The Australian Museum and IBM say they developed the world’s first smartphone app especially designed to let users record and report frog calls, croaks and chirps — without disturbing them.

Australia has 240 named native species of frog, and the museum wants to use its FrogID app to identify what it believes are dozens more still ribbiting under the radar.

“One of the cool things about this is you can survey frogs just by listening,” said Jodi Rowley, the museum’s curator of amphibian and reptile conservation biology.

“It’s actually a lot more accurate than photos, and photos encourage people to handle or disturb frogs,” Rowley added. She noted that every frog species has a unique call.

While frog populations are in decline around the world, Australia’s frogs are especially vulnerable because of a combination of climate change, pollution, introduced species and urban development, the country’s Department of Environment and Energy says.

According to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act four frog varieties are extinct, five are critically endangered, 14 are endangered and a further 10 are considered vulnerable.

Scientists say the presence of frogs in an ecosystem is a sign of good environmental health, but the small amphibians are highly sensitive to changes in their habitat.

Rowley said she hopes campers, hikers and other serious nature lovers will help with the research, but she noted that even the humble backyard fishpond could provide valuable data.

“It might allow us to figure out which areas of suburbia are really good for frogs, why they are good and hopefully help create more frog friendly habitats in suburbia,” she said.

Rowley said amateurs who record previously unknown frog calls may even help discover a new type of frog or determine if any introduced species have gone unnoticed.

“All these things will help us — and help Australia — make sure that frogs don’t croak,” she said.
…

The FBI has yet to gain access to data on Devin Kelley’s phone four days after the former airman killed 26 churchgoers in Texas in the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Thursday, blaming “warrant-proof encryption” for impeding criminal investigations.

The FBI’s San Antonio office sent Kelley’s encrypted phone to the bureau’s crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, earlier this week after agents were unable to unlock it, Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in San Antonio, Texas, said Tuesday.

But Rosenstein, speaking at the BWI Business partnership organization in Maryland, said the FBI has been unable to access “the data inside because of encryption.”

“Nobody has a legitimate privacy interest in that phone,” Rosenstein said. “The suspect is deceased. Even if he were alive, it would be legal for police and prosecutors to find out what is in the phone.”

The FBI declined to say whether the bureau had been able to unlock the phone but unable to access its encrypted data.

Kelley killed 26 people and injured 20 others at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday before turning the gun on himself.

The FBI has not identified the make or model of Kelley’s phone, but the Associated Press reported on Wednesday that it was an Apple iPhone.

Apple said on Wednesday that it “immediately” reached out to the FBI after “learning that investigators were trying to access a mobile phone.”

“We offered assistance and said we’d expedite our response to any legal process they send us,” Apple said in a statement.

Legal battle

Rosenstein said “strong encryption is good,” but he criticized technology companies for building devices and applications that make it difficult for law enforcement authorities even with a warrant to access encrypted data.

A 2016 legal dispute between the FBI and Apple over the bureau’s effort to gain access to the phone of San Bernardino mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farok fueled a national debate over privacy and public safety.

The FBI obtained a warrant to unlock the phone, but the data was encrypted and Apple refused to help the bureau gain access to the data.

The showdown ended after the FBI was able to open the device with the use of an unnamed third party.

FBI officials have long expressed frustration over increasingly sophisticated encryption technology that makes it harder for law enforcement to access devices and data.

In the first 11 months of the 2017 fiscal year, the FBI was unable to access the content of nearly 7,000 smartphones, more than half the total number of devices the bureau tried to access, FBI Director Christopher Wray said last week.

“And that’s a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board — narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime and child exploitation.”
…

Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent Holdings Ltd. on Thursday flagged video games and ad sales as areas where it thinks it could help Snapchat owner Snap after acquiring a 12 percent stake in the U.S. firm.

Snap disclosed in a U.S. regulatory filing on Wednesday that Tencent recently bought 145.8 million of its shares on the open market, fueling investor speculation about how the two companies might work together.

The U.S. social media company has struggled since its March initial public offering to meet analyst expectations for user growth, and it is locked in fierce competition for users and ad dollars with Facebook Inc.

In describing its stake, Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company by revenue, implied a close relationship with Snap that could go beyond passive investing and involve assisting the U.S. company with strategy.

Investors treated Tencent’s new stake as an investment rather than a step toward an acquisition, while analysts viewed the move as potentially more beneficial for the Chinese company than for Snap.

Shares in Snap fell 4.3 percent on Thursday to $12.35, adding to a 14.6 percent loss in the previous session. Snap went public at $17 a share.

Morgan Stanley analysts late on Wednesday cut their rating on the stock to “underweight” because of competition from Facebook’s Instagram, which has introduced features that mimic Snapchat’s disappearing messages. A separate Morgan Stanley division was lead underwriter for Snap’s IPO.

Tencent’s shares do not have voting power and the company will not have a board seat. Snap said in its filing on Wednesday that Tencent notified it of the share purchases this month.

“The investment enables Tencent to explore cooperation opportunities with the company on mobile games publishing and newsfeed as well as to share its financial returns from the growth of its businesses and monetization in the future,” Tencent said in an emailed statement. It also referred to the potential for newsfeed ads.

Redesign plan

It was not immediately clear if Snap has the same plan.

The California-based company declined to comment beyond its filing, in which it said it was inspired by Tencent’s creativity and entrepreneurial spirit and grateful to continue a productive relationship.

Snapchat does not have a Facebook-style newsfeed, but said on Tuesday that it was planning a redesign that could include such a feature.

Last year, PepsiCo Inc’s Gatorade ran an interactive video game ad on Snapchat featuring tennis star Serena Williams.

Beyond that and a few similar examples, the app has not offered mobile games.

Analysts said Tencent has benefited from its social media apps for the phenomenal popularity of its smartphone games such as Honour of Kings, and will need the help of local networks to fuel overseas growth.

Honour of Kings, based on Chinese historical characters, is the top-grossing mobile game in the world. It became so popular that Tencent in July curbed play time amid reports of addiction among children.

Tencent also owns Epic Games, developer of League of Legends, which is the most popular computer game in the United States and Europe according to research firm Newzoo.

Banned in China

Like other U.S. social networks, Snapchat is banned in China, although videos originating there are visible on the network presumably because of technological workarounds.

It is unlikely Snap “would ever be allowed to establish a foothold in China even if their relationship with Tencent were deeper,” Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group in New York said in a client note.

The companies operate on different scales. Tencent’s holdings include messaging apps QQ and WeChat, both ubiquitous in China, and its market capitalization of $469 billion is among the largest in the world. Snap’s is $15 billion.

“The China market is in some ways more advanced in social media and messaging than the U.S. is,” said Rebecca Fannin, founder of Silicon Dragon, a website about China and California’s Silicon Valley.

“Tencent might have teams come in and work with them,” Fannin said.

Tencent has global aspirations and may be buying shares with that strategy in mind, said Lindsay Conner, a Los Angeles lawyer who has represented Chinese companies in the United States.

“They often invest in companies to have a seat at the table, to understand businesses better, to see where the leading edge is between technology and content, and to have an insight into technology they should adopt or license,” he said.

Tencent first became an investor in Snap in 2013. The total size of its investment has not been disclosed.
…

The outsourcing industry in the Philippines, which has dethroned India as the country with the most call centers in the world, is worried that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will eat into the $23 billion sector.

AI-powered translators could dilute the biggest advantage the Philippines has, which is the wide use of English, an industry meeting was told this week. Other AI applications could take over process-driven jobs.

The Philippines’ business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is an economic lifeline for the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people. It employs about 1.15 million people and, along with remittances from overseas workers, remains one of the top two earners of foreign exchange.

“I don’t think our excellent command of spoken English is going to really be a protection five, 10 years from now. It really will not matter,” said Rajneesh Tiwary, chief delivery officer at Sutherland Global Services.

The Philippines, which was an American colony in the first half of the 20th century, overtook India in 2011 with the largest number of voice-based BPO services in the world.

“There’s definitely reasons to be concerned, because technology may be able to replace some of what could happen in voice,” Eric Simonson, managing partner of research at Everest Group, a management consulting and research firm, told Reuters.

AI, which combs through large troves of raw data to predict outcomes and recognize patterns, is expected to replace 40,000 to 50,000 “low-skilled” or process-driven BPO jobs in the next five years, said Rey Untal, president and chief executive officer of the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP).

Contact centers make up four-fifths of the Philippines’ total BPO industry, which accounts for 12.6 percent of the global market for BPO, according to IBPAP.

U.S. is biggest customer

BPO firms in the Philippines list Citibank, JPMorgan, Verizon, Convergys and Genpact among their clients. While the United States remains the biggest customer for the industry, demand for BPO services from Europe, Australia and New Zealand is also growing.

The Philippines’ share of the global outsourcing pie, estimated to reach about $250 billion by 2022, is forecast by the industry to reach 15 percent by that year.

To get there however, the Southeast Asian nation must prove to the world it has more to offer than just a pool of English-speaking talent. BPO executives said the country has to take on high-value outsourcing jobs in research and analytics and turn the headwinds from artificial intelligence into an opportunity.

The key to staying relevant and ahead of the competition, they said, is to ensure workers are trained in areas like data analytics, machine learning and data mining.

“You will see in the next few years more automation coming in the way we do things in IT and the BPO industry, robotic processing, the use of chat bots,” Luis Pined, president of IBM Philippines, told Reuters.

“If we are ahead of the game, we will be at an advantage where people will give us more work, because we are cheaper and productive,” Pined said.

IBM Philippines divested its voice business in 2013.

IBPAP has projected a rise in the number of mid- and high-skilled jobs, or those that require abstract thinking and specialized expertise, which should bring the overall head count in the BPO sector to 1.8 million by 2022.

Augmenting the English language skills of the Philippines with technology will be a “game changer,” said Untal, the head of the association. “Who else can compete with us?”
…

Disguised Russian agents on Twitter rushed to deflect scandalous news about Donald Trump just before last year’s presidential election while straining to refocus criticism on the mainstream media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to an Associated Press analysis of since-deleted accounts.

Tweets by Russia-backed accounts such as “America_1st_” and “BatonRougeVoice” on October 7, 2016, actively pivoted away from news of an audio recording in which Trump made crude comments about groping women, and instead touted damaging emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.

Since early this year, the extent of Russian intrusion to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the election has been the subject of both congressional scrutiny and a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. In particular, those investigations are looking into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

AP’s analysis illuminates the obvious strategy behind the Russian cyber meddling: swiftly react, distort and distract attention from any negative Trump news.

The AP examined 36,210 tweets from Aug. 31, 2015, to Nov. 10, 2016, posted by 382 of the Russian accounts that Twitter shared with congressional investigators last week. Twitter deactivated the accounts, deleting the tweets and making them inaccessible on the internet. But a limited selection of the accounts’ Twitter activity was retrieved by matching account handles against an archive obtained by AP.

“MSM [the mainstream media] is at it again with Billy Bush recording … What about telling Americans how Hillary defended a rapist and later laughed at his victim?” tweeted the America_1st_ account, which had 25,045 followers at its peak, according to metadata in the archive. The tweet went out the afternoon of Oct. 7, just hours after The Washington Post broke the story about Trump’s comments to Bush, then host of Access Hollywood, about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women, saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Within an hour of the Post’s story, WikiLeaks unleashed its own bombshell about hacked email from Podesta’s account, a release the Russian accounts had been foreshadowing for days.

“WikiLeaks’ [founder Julian] Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election,” tweeted both “SpecialAffair” and “ScreamyMonkey” within a second of each other on Oct. 4. “SpecialAffair,” an account describing itself as a “Political junkie in action,” had 11,255 followers at the time. “ScreamyMonkey,” self-described as a “First frontier.News aggregator,” had 13,224. Both accounts were created within three days of each other in late December 2014.

Twitter handed over the handles of 2,752 accounts it identified as coming from Russia’s Internet Research Agency to congressional investigators ahead of the social media giant’s Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 appearances on Capitol Hill. It said 9 percent of the tweets were election-related but didn’t make the tweets themselves public.

That makes the archive the AP obtained the most comprehensive historical picture so far of Russian activity on Twitter in the crucial run-up to the Nov. 8, 2016, vote. Twitter policy requires developers who archive its material to delete tweets from suspended accounts as soon as reasonably possible, unless doing so would violate the law or Twitter grants an exception. It’s possible the existence of the deleted tweets in the archive obtained by the AP runs afoul of those rules.

Earlier activity

The Russian accounts didn’t just spring into action at the last minute. They were similarly active at earlier points in the campaign.

When Trump reversed himself on a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace on Sept. 17, declaring abruptly that Obama “was born in the United States, period,” several Russian accounts chimed in to echo Trump’s subsequent false claim that it was Clinton who had started the birther controversy.

Others continued to push birther narratives. The Russian account TEN_GOP, which many mistook for the official account of the Tennessee Republican Party, linked to a video that claimed that Obama “admits he was born in Kenya.” But the Russian accounts weren’t in lockstep. The handle “hyddrox” retweeted a post by the anti-Trump billionaire Mark Cuban that the “MSM [mainstream media] is being suckered into chasing birther stories.”

On Sept. 15, Clinton returned to the campaign trail following a bout with pneumonia that caused her to stumble at a 9/11 memorial service.

The Russian account “Pamela_Moore13” noted that her intro music was “I Feel Good” by James Brown — then observed that “James Brown died of pneumonia,” a line that was repeated at least 11 times by Russian accounts, including by “Jenn_Abrams,” which had 59,868 followers at the time.

According to several obituaries, Brown died of congestive heart failure related to pneumonia.

Racial discord also figured prominently in the tweets, just as it did with many of the ads Russian trolls had purchased on Facebook in the months leading up to and following the election. One Russian account, “Blacks4DTrump,” tweeted a Trump quote on Sept. 16 in which he declared “it is the Democratic party that is the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow & the party of opposition.”

TEN_GOP, meanwhile, asked followers to “SPREAD the msg of black pastor explaining why African-Americans should vote Donald Trump!”
…

U.S. President Donald Trump went around and over the “Great Firewall” of China in a late-night tweet in Beijing as he thanked his hosts for a rare tour of the Forbidden City and a private dinner at the sprawling, centuries-old palace complex.

Many Western social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in China. A sophisticated system has been built to deny online users within China access to blocked content.

That was not an issue for Trump, known for tweeting to his 42.3 million followers at any hour of the day, Wednesday, the day he arrived in Beijing.

“On behalf of @FLOTUS Melania and I, THANK YOU for an unforgettable afternoon and evening at the Forbidden City in Beijing, President Xi and Madame Peng Liyuan. We are looking forward to rejoining you tomorrow morning!”

Trump even changed his Twitter banner, uploading a photograph of himself and Melania with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, during a Chinese opera performance at the Forbidden City.

The Twitter banner upload did not go unnoticed by Chinese state media, with state broadcaster CCTV flashing screenshots of the photograph Thursday.

Trump’s visit was also the third-most talked-about topic on Chinese social media platform Weibo over the last 24 hours, trailing only the birthday of a singer in a Chinese boy band and a weekly Asian pop song chart.

Many people wondered how Trump managed to evade China’s tough internet controls.

“I guess he must have done it via WiFi on a satellite network,” said a user on Weibo.

Many foreigners log on to virtual private networks (VPNs) to access content hosted outside of China. Another option is to sign up for a data-roaming service before leaving one’s home country.

Not all of Trump’s tweets in China were bright and cheerful.

​
…

Executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter faced anger from lawmakers last week over their platforms’ roles in Russian interference into the 2016 election. But for Silicon Valley, the biggest challenge lies ahead as tech companies look for ways to work with a U.S. Congress intent on closing legal loopholes before 2018 midterm elections.

Congressional scrutiny showed U.S. law has fallen behind the rapid growth of social media. Without rules governing paid political advertising on social media, foreign agents were free to post false or inflammatory material in an attempt manipulate public opinion. But lawmakers remain optimistic about the opportunity to learn from the past.

“If there is a place that has ever understood change, it’s Silicon Valley. It is based on disruption. It’s based on people taking risks,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, told VOA.

Greater transparency

Eshoo, whose congressional district covers part of Silicon Valley, has been a longtime advocate for greater transparency in the more traditional fields of TV and print political advertising.

“When citizens know who has paid for something, it has an effect on their thinking,” Eshoo said. “It doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t still be Americans that would like that divisive ad. But at least they’ll know where it comes from, and you can have a much clearer debate about who is saying what and what they are attempting to do.”

The HONEST Ads Act, a legislative proposal recently introduced in both houses of Congress, follows along those lines.

If passed, the bill would regulate online political ads under the same rules as broadcast advertisements, requiring companies to keep a public database storing those ads and providing information about their funding.

“Americans deserve to know who’s paying for the online ads,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the bill, said last month. “Even if the Russian interference hadn’t occurred, we should still be updating our laws. Our laws should be as sophisticated as those who are trying to manipulate us.”

“Creating a database like that is going to be hard and complicated and messy. It’s a good idea that’s going to have a tough execution,” Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, told VOA.

Karpf said that while there are no perfect solutions, it’s important to recognize the tech companies for what they’ve become.

“Facebook and Google are media companies — they’re just different media companies then we’re used to seeing,” he said. “They’re not broadcasters, but they are information platforms. And they’re quasi-monopolies — even a benevolent monopoly is a bad thing for public discourse and public knowledge.”

But none of the social media heads would fully commit to support of the bill as it now stands during their congressional testimony, appearing instead to favor a self-policing approach.

Battling fake news

Addressing paid political advertisements on social media platforms is just one part of the puzzle. The 2016 election revealed a vast ecosystem of fake news that will be almost impossible to police.

“What’s an even greater problem is that the Russians and others are setting up sites to deliberately disseminate misinformation — false news, fake news, what have you — they are not identifying themselves as Russian-sponsored,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of an October 2017 report on Russian cybermeddling.

“This is the larger problem for Facebook and other social media companies — how to handle the deliberate disinformation — and I’m not so sure the solution is legislative,” Jacobson said.

Eshoo downplayed talk that these challenges signal a downturn for tech innovators, saying it’s time lawmakers, companies and citizens took on a shared responsibility.

“We need to do a much better job with this,” she said. “We’re going to need them to cooperate with us. I don’t think that there has to be a slugfest on this.” She said the social media companies need to tell Congress how, in terms of their engineering and their algorithms, they can best accomplish what lawmakers set forth.
…