WASHINGTON, D.C. – During a hearing today in the Senate Intelligence Committee, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) questioned social media experts on the ongoing foreign influence operations to impact American society, and ways that Americans can defend themselves. The witnesses before the committee today were Todd Helmus, Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation; Renee DiResta, Director of Research at New Knowledge; John Kelly, Founder and CEO at Graphika; Laura Rosenberger, Director at Alliance for Securing Democracy at The German Marshall Fun of United States; Dr. Phillip Howard, Director at Oxford Internet Institute.

“I’ve been listening [to the testimony of the witnesses], and came up with a couple of conclusions. Tell me if I’m right,” said Senator King during the hearing. “One is, there is a massive, sophisticated, persistent campaign on multiple fronts to misinform, divide, and ultimately manipulate the American people ... I think that’s incredibly important because, in all of this whole Russia active measures thing, a lot of the space and energy has been going into campaigns, and elections, and collusion, and those kinds of questions. This is an enormous part of what’s going on, and it worries me that we’ve sort of lost sight of this. The second thing I’ve learned from you is, number one, it’s still happening…[and] it’s more sophisticated than it was in 2016. They’re learning to hide their tracks, not pay in rubles, which I would have thought they’d figured out before, but more sophisticated. And then finally, it seems to me, what you’ve been suggesting is we’re asymmetrically vulnerable because of the First Amendment and democracy. Our whole system is based on information, and we have this principle of open access to information.”

Throughout the above testimony, Senator King asked the witnesses to agree or disagree with his three conclusions; each conclusion was unanimously agreed upon by the experts.

“It seems to me that there are three ways to combat this, and the first, and this is… technical solutions,” Senator King continued. “Things that have been mentioned today that we could do and that Facebook could do, or Google, or Reddit, or Twitter, whoever – technical solutions – identifying bots for example, those kinds of things. Please give us some specificity, and things that you think we might be able to do without violating the First Amendment. I shudder when I hear the words ‘regulate the internet’. I don’t want to do that, but there may be things that we can do that could be helpful. The second thing…we need to do a better job of media literacy. I had a meeting in the fall of 2016 with a group of people from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and I said what do you do about this problem with Russian’s propaganda? You can’t unplug the internet, you can’t unplug your TV. They had a very interesting answer. They said “the way it works over here is, everybody knows it’s happening. And therefore, when something like this comes online, people say ‘oh it’s just the Russians again.’ We haven’t gotten to that point…It’s deeper than just having a hearing. You know our kids are growing up with these devices but not necessarily being taught how they can be manipulated by their devices. I think there ought to be standardized courses in high school called ‘Digital Literacy’ and increasing the public’s awareness that they are being conned, or that at least they’re potentially being conned, and how to ask those kinds of questions.

“Final point… is deterrence. Ultimately, we cannot rely exclusively on defense. The problem thus far, it seems to me, is that the Russians in this case, and others, see us as a cheap date. We are an easy target with no results, nothing happens. And that would be something I hope you all again could take for the record, because of a lack of time, to give us some thought about deterrence. I think it’s important, it doesn’t have to be cyber, it could be deterrence in a number of areas, including sanctions as we’ve discussed. There has to be some price to be paid, otherwise, as we now know, it’s going to continue.”

Senator King has been a leading voice on the need for a national emphasis on cyber deterrence, and has repeatedly pressed officials in both the Obama and Trump Administrations on the importance of deterrence. In March, he highlighted the topic in both the ENR and Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). Earlier that week, Senator King questioned Admiral Mike Rogers, the former Director of the National Security Agency and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, on the status of a report from the Secretary of Defense that was mandated by a King-led provision in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act and is currently eight months past due. In addition, he questioned top national intelligence officials in February on the lack of a national doctrine on the subject.