If I may, in my view, the quicker route to effectively pulling the curtain back on this and giving meaningful government action towards addressing this issue is far more on the education of the public side than it is on the legislative side. I worry that any legislative tool would be a very unpopular and broad hammer that would restrict legitimate uses of social media.
However, we have seen the effectiveness of campaigns in other domains, education campaigns that educate the public, for example, about not sharing their password, not being phished online, or about protecting their information or their social insurance number. These are all things that can be done to educate people, as the witnesses have talked about, to pull back the curtain on what these technology companies are doing.
I do not believe that there will be legislation that could protect us from manipulation through social media, because if you were to ban political ads.... We used the example of the Russian video where the person was pouring bleach. In that case, it wasn't a political ad at all. It was just someone doing something that was a viral video on the Internet that provoked a reaction against feminists and the left wing, and that provoked an action against the right wing.
To me, we should educate people that we do need to take that second step to try to verify and step back from the lizard brain deep within us telling us this is true and say, “Let me apply some rational thinking to this”. I do feel that would result in some more effective means.