(l-r) Colin Stretch of Facebook, Sean Edgett of Twitter and Kent Walker of Google. Photo credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

In two separate congressional hearings Wednesday, top lawyers from Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. testified on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In both hearings, the trio of in-house lawyers faced scrutiny about a “cataclysmic change” and what's being done to address it.

As with yesterday's hearing, Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch and Twitter acting general counsel Sean Edgett represented their respective companies. But joining them Wednesday was another high-powered Silicon Valley lawyer, Google general counsel Kent Walker.

In opening remarks, both Stretch and Edgett reiterated that foreign interference in elections is a serious problem and expressed commitment to ensuring future meddling is thwarted. Walker echoed that Google is “deeply concerned,” adding that the company “was founded with the mission of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. The abuse of the tools and platforms we build is antithetical to that mission.”

With Wednesday's hearings, lawmakers again stressed that Facebook, Google and Twitter wield an enormous amount of power and must do more to ensure their platforms aren't abused. In the close to six hours of testimony, the three tech attorneys had to field questions on foreign ad purchases, fake news and internal policies.

To Google: New Ad Buying Policy?

Federal election law makes clear that foreign actors cannot make contributions or spend money to influence national, state or local polls in the United States. But the very activity examined in these hearings makes it clear that foreign actors may be able to get around U.S. law on certain platforms, which is why a number of senators are pushing the Federal Election Commission for a look at “existing loopholes in our campaign disclosure regime.”

In the first of the hearings Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. James Risch touched on this issue, asking Google's Walker if a company policy aimed at ensuring only U.S. nationals can buy an election ad for a U.S. election is intended to confine users to elections in their own countries.

“Certainly that's the case in the United States and any other country around the world where that's the aw, yes,” Walker said, adding that the company is “looking at other elections around the world to make sure we do whatever we can to minimize electoral interference.”

Risch seemed skeptical that this will be feasible, telling Walker that this is “going to be a big challenge for you.”

“I Don't Think You Get It”

A number of members of Congress in the hearings have expressed disappointment that it was in-house counsel, and not company CEOs, in the hot seat. For Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the frustration was a lack of understanding about the severity of the election inference problem. “I must say, I don't think you get it,” she said to all three attorneys. “What we're talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we're talking about is the beginning of cyber warfare.”

“We are not going to go away, gentlemen,” Feinstein warned. “You have a huge problem on your hands … you've created these platforms and now they are being misused and you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will.”

The senator took aim at Google, for one, questioning why the company didn't immediately revoke television network Russia Today's preferred status, even after the intelligence community determined and publicly stated that RT was a part of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the election.

“We have carefully reviewed the content of RT to see that it complies with the policies that we have against hate speech, incitement of violence, et cetera,” Walker said. “So far, we have not found violations, but we continue to look.”

He added that transparency is key. Americans should have access to information from a number of perspectives, he said, “but they should know what they're getting.” And so, he noted, Google provides information about the government-funded nature of RT and is looking at ways to expand those types of disclosures to YouTube and other platforms.

Fake News

In the third and final hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, all three in-house lawyers were asked by Rep. Frank LoBiondo to address the responsibility of social media platforms to balance the need to remove false information with the need to preserve freedom of speech. LoBiondo asked how each company plans to target false news while still protecting political discourse.

Google is taking a number of different steps to focus on fake news, Walker said, such as improving algorithms, providing training, improving the Google rankings of authentic news and making use of fact check labels to help users identify information that has been verified. As for advertising, Walker said policies have been updated and steps have been taken to disallow ads on sites that “misrepresent their nature or purpose.”

At Facebook, Stretch said the company has found that most fake news is financially motivated, so efforts are being made to “to disrupt the financial incentives.” Stretch said Facebook also relies on user education efforts and seeks to limit distribution of fake news in part by alerting users who are attempting to share it.

Edgett, noting that this is a “definite balance,” said Twitter's focus is on targeting bad behavior, which has been a successful approach utilized by the company with respect to problems such as terrorism and child sexual exploitation on its platform. “We're trying to figure how we can use those learnings to stop the amplification of false news or misinformation,” Edgett said.

But there were still doubts from the committee about whether these efforts by tech companies and their attorneys would amount to enough.

“The 2018 election is not that far out,” Rep. Mike Conaway, who is leading the committee's probe into Russian interference in the election, said in his closing remarks. “The bad news is that I suspect our adversaries will learn all of the things you're doing to fix what happened … and will look forward to trying to escape your fixes going forward.”