Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, said social media giants should face fines for not removing "bots" that have been identified by government.
"I think that would be a great idea," she told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "But then you need a Congress to act and there are too many people who are afraid of doing something about this because we know these sites are popular."
Klobuchar said social media was flooded with these bots.
"These are the most sophisticated companies in America," she said on "Meet the Press." "They have brilliant people working there. I believe that they've got to put more resources — maybe it means making less profits off of ads and other things — but they've got to put the resources into Facebook and Twitter to stop these bots from dominating the accounts."
Since the 2016 election U.S. intelligence agencies discovered that Russians have been using social media platforms in an attempt to interfere with political discourse by posing as American citizens and organizations, NBC News reported.
Klobuchar has been driving a bipartisan bill, the Honest Ads Act, that seeks to regulate political ads on tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook, according to Recode.
The aim of the legislation is to strengthen U.S. cybersecurity for elections but it does not address the issue of bots.
However, Klobuchar made her views clear on Sunday.
"There's an ugly side of this, and somebody said that there was systems set up without alarms, without locks, and big surprise, bad guys are coming in and manipulating people," she said, according to The Washington Examiner.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Stone responded by referring to the November Congressional testimony by the company's general counsel, which outlines its efforts to tackle the bot issue, Bloomberg reported.
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