Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) are heading to Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday to testify at three separate U.S. congressional hearings about the role of Russian-backed ads in potentially swaying last year’s presidential vote. Accusations about similar activity also routinely sprung up during Europe’s busy electoral season in 2017, with digital misinformation and other false reports going viral on social media.
The transatlantic political focus on these lucrative digital advertising platforms comes as tech companies (including Twitter) report record earnings, collectively garnering billions of euros, from selling people’s online attention to the highest bidder.
That cash cow, though, is now under assault.
Lawmakers in Washington, Brussels and other capitals fret that political groups may have used these advertising networks to garner undue influence during recent elections campaigns across the West and beyond, potentially swaying voters through a combination of online ads, fake news and other digital misinformation.
Questions abound about tech giants’ role in how politicians are elected worldwide. At its core is whether these digital advertising networks hold too much control over how people from Copenhagen to Chicago access information online.
“These platforms aren’t neutral, they’re making political decisions about what people see online,” said Laura DeNardis, an internet governance professor at American University in Washington.”We have privatized public discourse — everything that we do and say online is now owned by the private sector.”
From startups to global giants
Silicon Valley’s biggest names went from startup minnows to some of the world’s most valuable companies by creating the most sophisticated advertising networks, helping brands connect with consumers anywhere in the world. Facebook, Twitter and Google all produced versions of technology that can pinpoint people’s specific interests and online habits by crunching reams of digital data, often without users’ knowledge.
So far, these networks remain mostly unregulated by policymakers from Washington to Brussels, but that may soon change as EU and U.S. lawmakers begin to realize how much power such platforms have in forming the opinions of potential voters.
Facebook, for instance, identified 80,000 Russia-linked posts on its platform that sought to interfere in the 2016 election and were viewed by up to 126 million people, the company’s general counsel will tell a Senate panel Tuesday.
The so-called organic posts were planted by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency during the period from January 2015 to August 2017, General Counsel Colin Stretch will say, according to a copy of his written testimony, obtained by POLITICO.
In Germany and France, the social networking giant also identified, and removed, tens of thousands of fake accounts used to spread false messages and hate speech to citizens in the build-up to those countries’ elections earlier this year. In Britain, local lawmakers are investigating whether illicit digital advertising linked to Russia was used during last year’s referendum to leave the European Union.
Twitter will also tell U.S. lawmakers that it found more than 36,000 accounts with possible links to Russia that generated about 1.4 million election-related tweets during last year’s American presidential campaign. Google similarly will say it discovered 18 YouTube channels connected to the Internet Research Agency that spent almost $5,000 on advertising during the 2016 U.S. election cycle.
Such revelations leave these tech giants stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If the companies pull back on their digital advertising products (or make the algorithms that sit behind their technology more readily accessible to lawmakers or regulators), they risk tinkering with surefire financial success.
But already, regulators, including Europe’s top antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, have called for greater oversight over how this complicated technology often dictates what people can, and cannot, see online.
Not to be outdone, some U.S. lawmakers are following the lead of their European counterparts in calling for greater oversight, and potential antitrust investigations, into how a small number of tech companies now dominate huge swaths of the online world. These regulatory efforts, though, remain more aspirational than realistic because of ongoing inertia around digital issues in Congress.
Tech companies refute such allegations, claiming their digital services merely connect people around the globe like never before, and politicians, not Silicon Valley, still have oversight of the political world.
Yet in a sign they’re trying to get ahead of the issue, Facebook and Twitter held a series meetings with U.S. lawmakers ahead of this week’s congressional testimony. The goal: to calm politicians’ nerves and maintain the focus solely on the Russia-backed ads already made public.
And in an unprecedented step — one that highlights how seriously these companies are taking the renewed focus on their advertising cash cows — Twitter and Facebook announced plans last week to increase transparency of their ad networks. That includes publishing, in part, searchable records on all ads (both political and nonpolitical) that run online, as well as on which groups bought political advertising on their digital platforms.
Such initiatives will begin in North America, but both tech companies said they plan to roll out the programs worldwide in the near future.
“We remain deeply committed to helping protect the integrity of the electoral process,” Facebook said in a blog post. “And we will continue to work with our industry partners, lawmakers and our entire community to better ensure transparency and accountability in our advertising products.”
‘No-brainer’
These steps may sound like a no-brainer.
But six months ago, tech companies regularly balked at even the suggestion of making their digital networks more transparent. And researchers have long griped that Facebook and others hid behind claims of protecting individuals’ privacy on their networks to avoid making public the most basic information on how (political) ads were shared online.
“These changes will make it easier to spot political ads,” said Sam Jeffers, co-founder of WhoTargetsMe, a London-based nonpolitical group that designed a digital tool to monitor Facebook’s role during European and U.S. elections this year. “The potential for political ads will still be there, but it’ll be more transparent.”
By making their online advertising networks more open to scrutiny, these digital giants likely face only greater — not lesser — pressure to open up other parts of their operations to regulatory oversight. No matter what Big Tech does, many policymakers are unlikely to be satisfied until they’ve brought these companies to heel.
“States want to enforce their rules online,” said Paul Fehlinger, deputy director of the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network, a Paris-based nonprofit organization focused on digital issues. “We’re in a legal arms race where everyone is in offensive mode.”
Original Article
Source: politico.eu
Author: Mark Scott
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