America’s social media giants were back on Capitol Hill to answer for their actions in the face of a continuous effort by foreign trolls to poison American politics to their liking. This time, however, Twitter and Facebook at least had some efforts to show for themselves. Fresh off stopping an Iranian propaganda campaign without prompting or help from Uncle Sam, the tech CEOs offered a message of progress against the 21st-century trollscape. While they’ve made some undeniable strides, the long-term prognosis still looks grim.
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Superfriends unite: The looming threat of regulation has stalked Silicon Valley’s tech giants as their scandals mount. Mindful of the growing regularity chatter, both Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey stressed the industry’s efforts to police itself and work in concert. Sandberg pointed to the recent identification of an Iranian influence campaign on Facebook as a model for cooperation. In that case, cybersecurity company FireEye tipped off Facebook, which carried out an investigation of its own. “In our mind, that’s the system working,” Sandberg said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Twitter picked up the thread of the Iranian campaign from working with Facebook, and Dorsey also pointed to the information-sharing as a model: “This is not something we want to compete on.” He noted that Twitter now regularly meets with other social media companies to discuss common moderation issues and “had a meeting in the past two weeks with peer companies” on the subject.
Empty chairs at empty tables: Google was invited to join its counterparts at the hearing but opted to ghost on it instead, to the evident irritation of senators. The committee made sure to leave out a chair and placard for Google—tweeted out by ranking member Mark Warner—to highlight its absence. They also took turns at dunking on the Mountain View, California, company.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME): “Let me thank you both for being here and also to express my outrage that your counterpart at Google is not at the table as well.”
Sen. Tom Cotton: Asking aloud why Google appeared willing to cooperate with authoritarian governments like China and not the U.S. military: “Perhaps they didn’t send a witness to answer those questions because there is no answer to these questions.”
What about Reddit? Sure, Google dipped out on an invitation to testify, but the committee didn’t even invite another, equally important social media company to talk. Twitter is often mentioned in the same breath as Facebook and Google, but when you break down the number of users, Reddit now has as many as Twitter—around 330 million. Nor is Reddit any stranger to state-driven covert influence campaigns. Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election had a Reddit component, as did the recent Iranian influence campaign uncovered on Facebook.
Reddit officials have said they’re “cooperating with congressional inquiries” into Russian meddling but they haven’t received the same level of scrutiny. It’s probably not an accident, then, that they seem to be less chastened and filled with less initiative than Facebook and Twitter after the post-2017 publicity drubbing they received.
Study in contrasts: Many of Twitter and Facebook’s answers to questions were similar, if not identical, in substance, but Sandberg and Dorsey delivered them in contrasting styles. Sandberg was every bit the polished prep session byproduct. She spoke in talking points and appeared unflappable even during at times biting questioning from senators like California’s Kamala Harris. Dorsey, sporting a scraggly beard and inexplicably popped collar, gave off the opposite impression. Describing himself as “someone of very few words and typically pretty shy,” he read his opening statement off his phone as he tweeted it out as though he’d just rolled out of bed.
Deepfakes apocalypse: Senate intel members kept returning to the subject of “deepfakes”—a video technology that uses AI to create synthetic but realistic-looking video. Its primary application so far has been to create fake celebrity porn videos. As a few senators pointed out, the technology now used to make custom fake porn videos can just as easily be used for political purposes. Referring to the non-porn aspects of deepfake tech, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) called the end products “strikingly real” and the dawn of attainable fake video “a very different day for video sharing.”
Fighting bots with bots: When pressed on how to solve problems like deepfake disinformation, Sandberg and Dorsey kept punting to the promise of artificial intelligence as a savior. Facebook, Sandberg promised, was pursuing a two-pronged strategy of “investing in technology and investing in people” to moderate content. Twitter, Dorsey said, was trying to use “artificial intelligence and machine learning models to recognize patterns of behavior” to cope with its bad actor problems.
It’s probably not surprising that tech company CEOs have great faith that technology will solve their problems. But even the ever-faithful Zuckerberg has used a five- to 10-year timeline when predicting how long it would take the technology to get up to speed. And a number of experts say the nuances through which humans are capable of harassing, threatening, and deceiving each other with language and visuals are so subtle that even Zuckerberg’s distant AI capability timeline may be far off.
A clown needs a circus: InfoWars conspiracy king Alex Jones succeeded in his quest to make a spectacle of himself. Jones is salty over recent bans from Google and Facebook (Twitter has opted to let him slide), despite his claim that the sanctions against him would only grow his audience (it hasn’t). Jones tried to force a confrontation with the tech titans by sitting in the front row during the hearing but had to settle for a throwdown with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) during the break. As Jones warbled about being deplatformed and grabbed the senator’s arm, Rubio threatened to throw down with him. “You’re not going to get arrested,” he added. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
Another sideshow: Dorsey, a less frequent visitor to Capitol Hill than his Facebook counterparts, popped over to the House side for another hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That hearing was less focused on state-backed influence and disinformation campaigns but it, too, had a clown sideshow. Far-right conspiracy crank Laura Loomer interrupted the hearing to deliver a shouted and live-streamed monologue. Rep. Billy Long handled it in the best way possible: shouting her down with a rapid-fire mock auction.
Senate intel is the grownup: As the tech company scandals keep piling up, so do the congressional appearances. The late unpleasantness with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica saw founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg square off against an array of clueless senators from the Commerce and Judiciary committees who hadn’t the foggiest idea how social media worked. By contrast, Senate Intelligence Committee members appeared fairly well briefed and focused in their questioning. That may be due in part to the fact that the committee’s ranking Democrat, Mark Warner, was a veteran of the telecom industry before his career in politics. But the Senate intel committee has also distinguished itself by carrying out a more mature and bipartisan investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election than its dysfunctional House-side counterpart.
Head here to go deep on the story that everyone is obsessing over—all for Beast Inside members only.
