Can Facebook, Twitter Crack Down on Deception?

How much control do Facebook, Twitter and Google have over what happens on their platforms? Lawmakers called representatives from some of the world’s biggest tech companies to Washington in late October to explain how millions of Americans were exposed to deceptive content pushed by Russian sources during the 2016 presidential election. Days later, the problem of misinformation online reemerged in the wake of a mass shooting in Texas, with conspiracy theories about the event landing prominent placement on social media and quickly spreading. Lawmakers are fed up with both kinds of problems.

People with ties to the Russian government, including the St. Petersburg-based "troll farm" called the Internet Research Agency, used Facebook, Google and Twitter to spread content designed to sow social discord during the 2016 U.S. campaign. Sometimes this meant buying advertising to target a particular message to a specific population; in other cases it meant posting unpaid content and letting it spread on its own. About 150 million users saw posts from a company whose main purpose is to push Kremlin propaganda, and 11 million users saw ads it purchased. Twitter evidently offered to sell 15 percent of its U.S. election advertising to RT, the Russian news outlet that later registered as a foreign agent. At Google, some engineers coined the term "evil unicorns" to describe unverified, lie-filled posts on obscure topics.