Senators press tech giants on foreign election interference

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Election misinformation.

In 2020, social media companies were on high alert for posts with false or misleading information. During that time, many Americans were censored because their viewpoints were not shared by the ruling class.

Since then, leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have said they will be more neutral and hands-off this election.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Some are concerned that that leaves American voters vulnerable to misinformation…while others welcome the change.

How are social media companies handling things differently this time around?

A Senate hearing last month highlights what’s at stake for online conversations about next week’s election.

WORLD’s Paul Butler has the story.

MARK WARNER: I'm going to call this hearing to order. And I want to welcome today’s witnesses.

PAUL BUTLER: Members of the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee met with leaders of three social media companies in September to discuss foreign threats to U.S. elections.

WARNER: We have enough differences between Americans that those differences don't need to be exacerbated by our foreign adversaries.

The Committee’s Democrat Chairman Mark Warner grilled leaders from Meta, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company Alphabet about a variety of tactics used by foreign actors. One example: screenshots of online news articles with branding from FOX News and Washington Post, complete with bylines and images, but the stories are completely fake.

WARNER: Why didn't we catch this?

NICK CLEGG: So, I think that the key challenge here is to disrupt and remove the underlying networks of fake accounts that generate this content…

That’s Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg.

CLEGG: …that's the only foolproof way that we can deal with this, because otherwise, as you quite rightly say, Senator, we're just playing Whack-a-Mole with individual pieces of content.

What kinds of messages are foreign actors pushing in American media? Well, foreign policy expert Mark Montgomery told WORLD that Russia, Iran, and China have different strategies.

MARK MONTGOMERY: …When we watch the Russians, they advocate for President Trump and against Vice President Harris. When we look at the Iranians, they do the reverse. They advocate for Vice President Harris against President Trump. The Chinese are different. They advocate for both sides. They don't care who wins. They care that the American people are uncomfortable and unhappy.

During the Senate hearing, company leaders said they were committed to disrupting those strategies. But what to do with individual posts is much more challenging. In recent years, companies across the tech industry have slashed their workforces, especially in the so-called “trust and safety” departments…where content moderators work.

CARAH WHALEY: All of the platforms have rolled back their election integrity units.

Carah Ong Whaley is Director of Election Protection for Issue One, a nonprofit watch-dog group. Whaley monitors web traffic for misleading information related to elections.

WHALEY: We're seeing it spread by individuals. We're seeing it spread by state sponsored actors outside of the United States, and we're seeing it spread by bots.

For Whaley, the decision by social media companies to take a hands-off approach during a contentious election is—in her words—irresponsible.

WHALEY: None of them are doing what needs to happen to ensure that false election information doesn't spread.

But after highly publicized failures last election cycle, Republican lawmakers are wary of election-related content moderation.

MARCO RUBIO: In an effort to prevent discord, I don't want to sow discord.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio agrees that foreign threats are real and warrant a strategic response, however…

RUBIO: Where it gets complicated is there is a pre-existing view that people have in American politics…

For example, the belief that the U.S. should not have gotten involved in the war in Ukraine.

RUBIO: And now some Russian bot decides to amplify the views of an American citizen who happens to hold those views. And the question becomes, is that disinformation, or is that misinformation, is that an influence operation because an existing view is being amplified?

Rubio then revisited the October surprise of the 2020 presidential election.

RUBIO: We recall that in 2020…there was a laptop, Hunter Biden's laptop…

The New York Post reported on a laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop that apparently belonged to the son of the Democratic presidential candidate, and the device contained information damaging to the Biden family credibility. But then a group of former intelligence officers published an open letter saying the situation bore all the attributes of a Russian disinformation campaign.

RUBIO: And as a result, the New York Post who posted the original story had their story censored and taken down, their account locked. There was a concerted effort, on the basis of that letter, to silence a media outlet in the United States on something that actually turned out not to be a Russian disinformation.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he published internal documents revealing that Twitter’s previous leadership actively censored the laptop story. And more recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress saying government pressure to censor content related to COVID-19 was wrong, and Facebook should have been more outspoken in resisting that pressure.

JEREMY TEDESCO: The truth is, social media companies are under constant pressure to censor from external actors, government, private and otherwise.

Jeremy Tedesco is senior counsel and senior vice president for corporate engagement at the Alliance Defending Freedom.

TEDESCO: The public square has become digitized, it's digital and it's privately owned. And that means that there's a handful of companies, three, four, who really control where people get their information and what they can say.

Tedesco says that while social media companies have the power to promote or suppress information, they ought to be a place where ideas from various perspectives can be presented and debated.

TEDESCO: Counterspeech is the way to deal with speech you don't like or disagree with. It is, censorship is never the right approach to that.

With or without censors, ADF lawyer Tedesco says the buck for being informed stops with the users. And that each of us should be skeptical of everything we read, being sure to look into the source of the information.

TEDESCO: I mean, as soon as I see a video online, I say, I want to watch the whole video. You know, I don't, I don't take the 20-second clip, you know, and just take it to the bank. I want to see it in context, I want to see that in context. I think it's important for us to know the truth of the matter, and you can't always depend on other people to tell you what that is.

For her part, Whaley encourages voters to get election information straight from the source when possible.

WHALEY: You know, I think we're just again in this super fragmented, divisive information ecosystem where you know we don't know what to believe, and so just get out in your own community. Go check with your own local election official and make sure.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.