Preschoolers learn to grow their own produce. The bus system ends at about 5 00 p. M. Every day, so it doesnt run on the weekends either. It kind of creates this Little Island after 5 00, and theres nowhere to go for fresh food. Woodruff all that and more, on tonights pbs newshour. Major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by collette. Celebrating 100 years of travel, together. Babbel. A language app that teaches reallife conversations in a new language, like spanish, french, german, italian, and more. Babbels 1015 minute lessons are available as an app, or online. More information on babbel. Com. Bnsf railway. And with the ongoing support of these institutions this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Woodruff at least eight people are dead and 11 or more injured in Lower Manhattan today, after a rented pickup truck plowed into a busy bicycle path. The incident happened a few blocks away from the World Trade Center memorial site. The new York City Police department reported that a 29yearold male suspect was taken into custody. Mayor bill de blasio said they were increasing security in the area, and he urged people to be vigilant. Based on the information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror, aimed at innocent civilians, aimed at people going about their lives, who had no idea what was about to hit them. Woodruff for the latest, we turn to special correspondent marcia biggs in manhattan. Marcia, what do we know about what happened . Judy, this is still a developing investigation. Its only a couple hours old. What we know is that at 3 05 p. M. , a 9yearold male entered the west side esplanade, which is a bike path here on the west side of manhattan along the river, he entered in a home depot rented pickup truck at high speeds at houston street mowing down pedestrians and driving 15 blocks before colliding with a school bus. Then he exited the vehicle brandishing what appeared to be two weapon, a pellet gun and a paint ball gun before nypd officers shot him in the abdomen. He was then taken to the hospital. There are eight confirmed dead and over a dozen injured and they expect more injuries to come. Woodruff mar shark we heard mayor de blasio say it is an act of terror. Do we know what theyre basing that on . Judy, we dont know much. We. It was confirmed that it was an act of terror, as you said, as we heard, but it was also stressed that this is a lone wolf, that there is no wider plot understood, that also it was reported that there were witnesses saying that he had shouted out god is great in arabic, but the n. Y. P. D. Would not confirm that. Woodruff and marcia, we know this is a very busy area. We assume there is some security there when this happened. Well, the officers reacted very, very quickly. Commissioner ray kelly stressed today in an interview that i saw that the suspect did not use those weapons, that those weapons may have been inoperable if they were real at all. The n. Y. P. D. Was the only one firing shots, and they shot him very, very quickly, and arrested him. We dont have any other information about him other than his age. But the area around this neighborhood where im standing, which is just a few blocks from where it happened, was immediately put into lockdown mode. The high school nearby was put into lockdown mode. This was 3 00 p. M. , so school was about to be let out. This is a very busy neighborhood. Were just in the middle of the financial district. Its also a very Family Friendly neighborhood, a lot of residents in this area, schools, so it was a very quick lockdown, judy. Woodruff and i was just being reminded, the police chief is named oneill. Marcia, finally, we know this is halloween. A lot of people, children, are going to be out on the streets tonight. What are they saying to people about whether they can go out or not . Well, the mayor and the governor stressed new yorkers need to be new yorkers, new york is strong, we will not let this affect us. The halloween parade, which is a very, very famous and raucous, fun time in the west village is still apparently going ahead as planned, although it is not quite in this area. Its a little bit northeast of here, about a 15minute walk i would say some its not right in this area, but it was stressed in this press conference, new yorkers mead to be new yorkers. Judy . Woodruff marcia biggs reporting from Lower Manhattan. A reminder that things can change in an instant. Thank you, marcia. And were going to be updating all of you with this latest on the new york city attack and hear more about how Law Enforcement evaluates acts of terror at the end of the program. On capitol hill, the first of two days of hearings exploring the role of social media in the 2016 election. Representatives from facebook, twitter and google faced tough questions from a Senate Judiciary subcommitee. Nick schifrin reports. Reporter for the first time, social media giants came to congress to admit publicly their platforms have a political dark side. Facebook general counsel colin stretch the foreign interference we saw is reprehensible. Reporter acting twitter general counsel sean edgett the abuse of our platform by sophisticated foreign actors to attempt statesponsored manipulation of elections is a new challenge for us, and one that we are determined to meet. Reporter that foreign actor is russia, and facebook, twitter and google today admitted russia used the American Technology giants to try to manipulate how americans voted. That foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other Internet Services to try to sow division and discord, and to try to undermine the election, is directly contrary to our values, and goes against everything facebook stands for. Reporter on facebook, from june 2015 to august 2017, 120 fake accounts posted 80,000 times and reached as many as 126 million americans with content designed to be divisive, like the Group Secured borders, falsely accusing liberals of banning the word christmas, and a President Trump wearing a santa claus outfit; falsely claiming president barack obama wanted to pardon 750,000 undocumented immigrants; or the group defend the second, saying gun rights are important because its easier to get out of jail, than out of a cemetery. Note the missing a, a sure giveaway for a russian speaker. Many of these ads and posts are inflammatory. Some are downright offensive. And much of it will be reporter Facebook Says the ads were purchased and spread by russian trolls believed to work in this st. Petersburg building. Earlier this year i met marat mindiyarov, who used to be one of those trolls. Suddenly, you see a lot of comments at night, and theyre all the same, yeah . And its exactly the people doing their job. They have their topic, they have a time to do it, they write it, and you see it. Reporter he posted under the headline can the u. S. Take russia out . On 50 websites in 23 cities, and fellow trolls kiril ivashkin, gennady orlov, and mike brandon expressed the exact same thought. 600 posts from 70 fake accounts in 12 hours. Just one battalion in a sock ppet army manufactured by a handful of trolls. Back in the hearing reporter as for twitter, it said from last september through november 15, fake russian accounts posted 1. 4 million electionrelated tweets, nearly half of them automated, like blacktivist, who depicted African Americans as divided and destroyed by white society. If there is inflammatory content that some even would find to be upsetting, thats not the type of ad we want running on twitter. Reporter and google admitted that fake russian accounts opened 18 fake channels on its youtube service. We understand that any misuse of our platforms for this purpose can be very serious. Reporter congress is debating a law that would require regulation of political ads on social media, similar to tv and radio regulation. The social Media Companies are promising to disclose whos buying the ads and who theyre targeting. But some senators werent convinced the companies could to avoid a repeat of 2016. You cant put together points and say, those two data points spell something bad. Senator, its a signal we should have been alert to, and in hiebtd sight its one we missed. Republican john kennedy. Im trying to get us down from lala land here. The truth of the matter is you have five million advertisers that change every month, every minute, probably every second. You dont have the ability to know who every one of those advertisers is, do you . Seeing essentially behind the platform to understand if there are shell corporations, of course the answer is no. The problem is enormous, but put into perspective, on facebook and twitter russian trolls produce about onethird of 1 of all content. For the pbs news hour, im nick schifrin. Woodruff and to look deeper into how social Media Companies are dealing with foreign propaganda by russianlinked political accounts, im joined by thomas rid, a professor or strategic studies at Johns Hopkins university; and, timothy wu, hes a professor at Columbia Law School in new york city. He served as an adviser on the White House National economic council, in 2016. Gentlemen, thank you both for being with us. Thomas wu, to you first. Do we understand why it was so easy for the russians and others to infect the social media platforms with what they wanted to say in. You mean me, thomas rid first . Woodruff im sorry, i misspoke, timothy wu, yeah. I think we do. I think what we learned from todays hearings is that the companies themselves are acknowledging they do have a problem. Theyre open. Theyre big, automated machines. So as i think senator kennedy put it, you know, they have five million advertisers. Anyone can advertise very precisely to what they want, and that can also create fake accounts to spread whatever news they want. These are extremely vulnerable systems for foreign propaganda. Woodruff and thomas rid, these companies are now august acknowledging that their guard was down, that they did not do enough to screen what was coming in . They do, but its really important to distinguish between these companies, because theyre different, and the way they deal with this problem is also different. Facebook, the market drives facebook to fix the problem and to be more transparent, and they have been more transparent, and they have tried to fix the problem. The opposite is true for twitter. Twitter, the market drives twitter to hide the problem, and indeed to enable the removal of evidence. Why . Because basically twitter has a different naming policy. You can have anonymous accounts on twitter. You can have multiple accounts on twitter. No real name required. So the more accounts there are on twitter, the better twitter looks on the market, so theyre hiding a lot of automated activity on their site. Woodruff so timothy wu, in other words, its easier on some of these platt fort pierces than on others, namely on twitter than on facebook, to get propaganda apps . Im not sure i entirely agree with that. I think they both have similar incentives in the sense that they are both based on advertising models. In fact, facebook is more of an Advertising Market share, so they both have driven by the demand to have news, to have things shared, you know to, increase their share of attention. And theyre both extremely automated. So i think there are a lot of similarity, some differences, but a lot of similarities. They both structurally are vulnerable to foreign propaganda in a way that broadcasting or newspapers are not. I think thats the maybe main issue here. Drew so thomas rid, after todays testimony and based on what these companies are now saying, should we this confident they are putting in screens, filters now that werent there before . I think again i would be slightly more confident that facebook is making the right moves. They have hired a large, excellent team. Lets be a little more concrete on the side of twitter. The amount of automation, socalled bot accounts on twitter is an open question. How many bots are there on twit center the academic estimates range from 15 based on studies to 23 . That could be as much as onefifth of twitters user base being automated, being fake ultimately. So far twitter has not been as forthcoming as they should be to remove bots from their platform. Woodruff timothy wu, how would you assess how many steps, how much these sites, all three of them, youtube, and twitter and facebook, have done to improve security . Well, listen, i give them some credit for taking this problem seriously. A year ago they were in denial. So theyve chained that attitude, and i read through all the proposals, but, you know, they are to some level proposing Bandaid Solutions to what are structural problems. You know, the more Structural Solutions start to threaten their revenue streams. They have highly Automated Systems for advertising and for user identification, and they can hire. I think facebook said its hiring 4,000 people, thats a start. But the challenge fundamentally is its hard when you have a determined entity like a foreign state to figure out who is a fake person, who is a shell corporation, you know, who is. When you want to have an automated advertising system, these are extremely vulnerable to attac. So i think that structural change is different and its very difficult to do what they want to have millions and millions of advertisers and billions of users. Woodruff so thomas rid, given that, what more do they need to do right now, facebook and twitter and youtube . Social media embodies a fundamental contradiction at the heart of open, liberal democracy. We all want privacy protections. But we also want to understand how our democracy comes to decisions. So if you look at social media, what we find is that the bots, the disinformation operated, foreign spy agencies of the havent the same level of privacy protections as a 15yearold tweeting from her sofa at home under their real name. Woodruff youre saying nothing much can be done about that . I say we have to start distinguishing between bots and between real people, and we have to do this in a more thorough way. And we shouldnt allow a Foreign Intelligence Agency to edit the news, and really edit history in the united states. Woodruff and timothy wu, is that realist nick is that something that could be done before next years election . [laughing] i join him on saying there should be a war on bots. Thats something that didnt get addressed in todays hearing. I feel very strongly we need something called a blade runner law which forces entities to try the identify bots instead of the bots having to identify themselves as not human. We dont know. As you said, we dont know how many tens of millions of these entities are not human, and they absolutely aid these foreign propaganda its. I think its a priority. I give them credit for starting. By the next election i think theyre going to have to do a lot more, and i think congress has to keep watching everybody, because the incentives are not that deep. The revenue model is helped by foreign propaganda. Woodruff gentlemen, wile keep it there and well continue to watch it. Timothy wu, thomas rid. Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you. Woodruff and in other news, President Trump took to twitter today to downplay the role of a former Campaign Aide who plead guilty in the russian probe. George papadopoulos admitted to lying to the f. B. I. About his contacts with russia. Today, mr. Trump tweeted, few people knew the young, low level volunteer named george, who has already proven to be a liar. We will take a closer look at Robert Muellers investigation into russian meddling in the 2016 election, after the news summary. Mr. Trump also met with Business Leaders at the white house to push his plans for tax reform. Pushing speed, the president said he is hopefully not looking to phase in a Corporate Tax rate cut. He revealed his economic advisors will stay in washington during his upcoming asia trip to help finetune the tax overhaul. I want the house to pass a bill by thanksgiving. I want all of the people standing by my side when we get ready to sign by christmas. Hopefully before christmas, youll all be in the room standing front row center. I think well be able to find a place where you can all stand front row center. It will be a big event. It will be the biggest tax event in the history of our country. Woodruff House Republicans will unveil details of the tax reform legislation tomorrow. Congressman Jeb Hensarling of texas announced today he will not seek reelection in 2018. Hensarling, whose term as chairman of the House Financial Services committee is coming to an end next year, said he wants to spend more time with his family. At least a dozen g. O. P. Congress members have announced they are stepping down this year. The federal Emergency Management agency says its spending more than 200 million a day on disaster relief, after the recent torrent of hurricanes and wildfires. Its administrator, brock long, told a senate panel that the 52 billion approved by congress for emergency relief isnt enough. Long also had few answers about a canceled contract between puerto ricos Power Authority and whitefish, the Small Montana company it chose to rebuild its ruined grid. Theres no lawyer inside fema who would have ever agreed to the language that was in that contract to begin with, so let me be clear about that. And we raised the red flag. There were many things wrong. There was also language in there that would suggest the federal government would never audit whitefish. Theres not a lawyer inside fema that would ever agree to t