Google, Facebook and Twitter scramble to hold Washington at bay

Google summoned about 200 policy staff from around the world last month for a debate on whether the company’s size has made it too attractive as a target for government regulators.
 
The two-day retreat in Monterey, California, where employees from the $682-billion company plied Washington policy experts with questions about the pros and cons of its size, took place as Google confronts European antitrust claims and proposed US legislation that would increase online publishers’ liability for content produced by others.
 
This week, the Alphabet unit disclosed new information that could further roil the regulatory picture: Revelations that Russian-linked accounts used its advertising network to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The news put Google in the company of Facebook and Twitter, both of which are embroiled in the controversy surrounding Russia’s involvement in last year’s US elections. Executives at all three companies are scrambling to respond.

 

Facebook has hired two crisis PR firms, and it plans to bring on as many as 1,000 people to screen ads. Top executives, including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, are phoning members of Congress directly. The company reported spending more than $3.2 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2017, a company record. Google spent almost $6 million in the second quarter for its own record. Both companies, with Twitter, are working together to deal with issues related to the Russian ads.
 
“There is a lot of pressure to intervene in this case because of the democratic implications,” said Laura DeNardis, director of the Internet Governance Lab at American University in Washington. “Because of the rising stakes for cyberspace, for the economy, for democracy, there is greater attention on the part of all actors.”

 
It’s a delicate balance for the companies, whose products reached massive scale because of their ability to transact advertising automatically, without much restriction. They must figure out how much responsibility to take and how much change to promise, without succumbing to costly regulation or setting a precedent that might be difficult to follow in other countries.
 
In the context of political advertising, some lawmakers are already proposing new limits. “We must update our laws to ensure that when political ads are sold online Americans know who paid for them,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said Monday.
 

Two congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller are examining whether Russian operatives used social-media platforms to influence US voters in 2016. Investigators are also examining possible collusion between Russian interests and associates of President Donald Trump.