The Senate Intelligence Committee will hear today from top executives at Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft about foreign election interference.
It could get tense.
The hearing is being held amid worries the tactics by bad actors are growing more sophisticated. It also follows the recent indictment of two Russian employees of the Moscow-run RT news site.
Expect Intel Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) to demand the companies tell lawmakers what they’re actually doing to fulfill commitments they’ve made to try to detect foreign election interference.
Despite election interference being a major issue since 2016, Congress doesn’t often haul the tech companies before lawmakers to discuss the issue.
Here’s what we’ll be watching for as Alphabet President of Global Affairs Kent Walker, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and Microsoft President Brad Smith head up to the Hill.
Russia, Russia, Russia: The committee’s top priority is going to be the Kremlin’s efforts to tilt November’s contest. While the basic tactics of fake content and stoking divisions by posing as Americans are alive and well, Russia’s ability to jump quickly on U.S. political developments and to supercharge its efforts with AI have grown.
Research released by Microsoft on Tuesday showed Russia has already quickly pivoted to attacking the Harris-Walz ticket. The shift highlights that Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services have been able to gin up new messages and exploit emerging fissures.
To committee leaders, these efforts are more sophisticated and coming faster. Compare a phony Russian-linked, AI-generated video of Harris supporters behaving badly to efforts in 2016, which were sometimes slow to adapt to new developments and more or less illiterate on U.S. culture.
Iran’s election interference efforts are sure to pop up too.
X is the elephant in the room: Notably absent from the witness table is X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump.
The committee had locked in a witness from X, Nick Pickles, a policy official who routinely represented the company at past grillings by lawmakers. But Pickles announced earlier this month that he was leaving the company.
Will the bipartisanship hold? Warner and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the committee’s vice chair, try to move somewhat in lockstep on big issues.
Ultimately, though, Russia’s efforts are aimed at bringing Trump back to the White House. And there’s plenty of domestic disinformation that benefits from Republican pressure on tech companies to pull back on content moderation.
The pullback is real. David Evan Harris, who worked at the defunct civic integrity team at Facebook, testified on Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that “trust and safety teams have shrunk dramatically” during the last two years. “Secrecy is on the rise and transparency is on the decline,” Harris said.
— Ben Brody
