Technology Companies Face Growing Questions in Russia Probe - NBCNews.com

Twitter is rethinking its terms in the Trump era. NurPhoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the bipartisan team leading the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's investigation into Russian interference, issued a joint statement on Wednesday outlining the next big public step in the investigation - hearing from Facebook and other technology companies in an open hearing.

"In the coming month, we will hold an open hearing with representatives from tech companies in order to better understand how Russia used online tools and platforms to sow discord in and influence our election," they said.

It was not yet known whether Zuckerberg might testify at that open hearing. However, his lengthy response on Wednesday aimed to put Facebook's role in the election into perspective.

He said the facts suggest "the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying."

"Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found," he said.

With this being the first election where the internet truly played a starring role, candidates were able to directly communicate with tens of millions of followers through their Facebook pages. In addition, Zuckerberg said there were billions of interactions on Facebook discussing the issues, including well beyond what was covered in the media.

"After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it," he said.

"This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election."

It's not the first time Trump directly took aim at Facebook and the Russian advertisements. In a tweet earlier this month, he appeared to dismiss the scrutiny of ads on Facebook.

Last week, Zuckerberg shared the company's "next steps" during a Facebook Live video stream from the Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where he addressed measures the social media giant is taking to protect the integrity of future elections.

Many of Facebook's five million advertisers are able to set up their advertising campaigns without ever needing to work with a human on the other end.

The suspected Russian advertisements running in the United States were no different.

"Most ads are bought programmatically through our apps and website without the advertiser ever speaking to anyone at Facebook. That's what happened here," Zuckerberg said. "But even without our employees involved in the sales, we can do better."

Facebook has pledged to implement additional measures to ensure the integrity and transparency of ads, including disclosing who paid for them.

When people go to their page, they'll also be able to see all of the ads the person or group is running, Zuckerberg said.

They'll also work with candidates and local election officials to help ensure the integrity of elections and to stop the spread of misinformation.

These efforts were most recently seen with the German election. Facebook tested related articles to help provide different perspectives and using machine learning to reduce clickbait and spam stories and videos.

"These actions did not eliminate misinformation entirely in this election – but they did make it harder to spread, and less likely to appear in people’s News Feeds," Richard Allan, vice president of public policy, said in a

blog post. "Studies concluded that the level of false news was low. We learned a lot, and will continue to apply those lessons in other forthcoming elections."

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