BY MAYA KOSOFF
Last fall, when lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google were summoned to Capitol Hill to account for the companies’ manipulation by Moscow during the 2016 election, lawmakers were ready to teach the new masters of the universe a lesson in humility. “I must say, I don’t think you get it,” California Senator Dianne Feinstein told representatives for the companies, which had dispatched lawyers in lieu of their C.E.O.s. “What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyber-warfare.” Nearly a year later, however, with the midterm elections fast approaching, bipartisan fury has yielded to the realities of Washington. The Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would force companies like Facebook to disclose information about political ads, remains stuck in committee. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress have stonewalled legislation that would help safeguard U.S. elections, reportedly over objections by the White House. And so Silicon Valley, which arguably bears the most responsibility for failing to identify or address foreign propaganda campaigns during the last election cycle, has become something of a last line of defense for the next one.
With intelligence officials warning of continued efforts by the likes of Russia to weaponize U.S. social media, a coalition of representatives from a dozen companies including Google, Snapchat, and Microsoft will meet Friday at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to discuss both the work they’ve been doing to challenge security threats and the problems each company faces in advance of the midterms, BuzzFeed News reports. Facebook and Twitter have faced the harshest national scrutiny for allowing their platforms to be infiltrated by foreign agents. But with midterms on the horizon, other tech companies, too, seem laser-focused on getting their houses in order. “As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Facebook’s head of cyber-security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote in an e-mail invitation last week.
Friday’s meeting isn’t the first time these companies have come together—a similar group reportedly convened at Facebook in May, along with representatives from the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security. But it does suggest that the tech giants are taking the problem of cross-platform coordination more seriously. As Bret Schafer, a social-media analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, recently told me, the information war isn’t being fought on just one front. “It’s not like the Russians have a different unit of people on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit. They’re all connected,” he explained. “Each platform is doing a good job monitoring their space, but they’re just cutting off one tentacle of a multi-pronged organism.” Ideally, those efforts would be coordinated, or at least assisted, by the federal government. But with President Donald Trump largely disinterested in highlighting an issue that raises questions about his own election, his administration has struggled to rally an adequate response.
For Silicon Valley, meanwhile, election integrity has become as much a fiduciary concern as an ethical responsibility. Late last month, Facebook announced that it had discovered new, malicious Facebook and Instagram accounts designed to influence elections by targeting divisive social issues; this week, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook had shut down 652 Iran- and Russia-linked pages and groups. Microsoft President Brad Smith announced this week that his company had caught a new round of phishing attacks on right-leaning, anti-Putin U.S. think tanks. Twitter, too, said it had removed 284 accounts that appeared to be linked to Iran over malicious behavior on the platform. These efforts almost certainly run deeper than an earnest campaign to safeguard our democracy—with public sentiment toward Big Tech still in the red, hunting would-be hackers is an easy way to rustle up good P.R., and perhaps avoid threats of regulation in the process. But these are desperate times, and Silicon Valley’s choice to coordinate is a net positive, particularly in light of the president’s reluctance to even pinpoint the culprit.
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