Senate Panel Grills Social Media Lawyers Over Election Meddling

While many of the senators praised the representatives for their companies' innovations, a bipartisan agreement was reached swiftly by the committee and oft repeated: the sheer power of each platform for personal expression is awe-inducing but the prospect of regulating ad content is a minefield of potential First Amendment violations.
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"How can you be aware? You've got 5 million advertisers per month and you're going to tell me that you're able to trace the origin of [them all?]" [Sen. John Neely] Kennedy asked. "You're telling me you have the ability to go through all of these corporations and find the true identities of every one of your advertisers? You're not telling me that, are you?"
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"How did you not make the connection that ads were being paid for - American political ads - paid for in Russian money, in rubles? How could you not connect those two dots? You put billions of data points together all the time," [Sen. Al] Franken railed.  "Google has all of the knowledge that man has ever developed and you can't put together rubles with a political ad and go, `Hmm, do those two data points spell out something bad?"

Quite a spectacle of the absurd since the "series of tubes" debacle, 2006.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.