Editorial: How Google, Facebook, Twitter should prevent election interference

The rise of digital media giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter has drastically changed how people get and share information, and thus how they make decisions — including how they vote. It was inevitable that at some point this would get the attention of America’s political class — and would lead to calls for regulation.

That point has come. Two days of Senate hearings — prompted by still-simmering anger over Russian use of social media to manipulate the 2016 U.S. election — started Tuesday. Before the hearings, The New York Times, citing the tech firms, revealed that material linked to Russia reached 126 million Facebook users, was shared in 1.4 million Twitter messages from 36,000 accounts, and uploaded in 1,100-plus videos to Google-owned YouTube.

Though these estimates are much higher than previous ones, they’re still just a tiny fraction of total traffic on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But there’s no question this effort had an effect on the election — starting with the leaks that used hacked emails to show some ostensibly neutral leaders of the Democratic National Committee favored Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Tuesday’s hearing saw no pushback from tech officials to the idea that Russia used their companies for malign purposes. “The foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry, and our society,” Twitter lawyer Sean Edgett said.

Nevertheless, conflict appears to loom over the Honest Ads Act, the proposed social media regulations that have gotten the most attention so far. Introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, Mark Warner, D-Virginia, and John McCain, R-Arizona, the bill has three key provisions. It would:

-- Amend existing law to define paid internet and digital advertisements as types of regulated electioneering communication.

-- Require large digital platforms to maintain a public file with details about all electioneering communications purchased by a group or individual who spends more than $500 on advertising.

-- Require online platforms “to make all reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate.”

The Internet Association — a trade group founded by industry giants — accepts the need to regulate paid internet and digital advertisements. But it is rightly skeptical about internet firms being asked to follow vague rules and worried that disclosure rules could affect the privacy of advertisers.

Google, Facebook and Twitter better figure out what they can live with — and quickly — because there is a regulatory freight train bearing down on them. The Honest Ads Act is mild compared with what some of tech firms’ critics want to do. Upset over what he sees as their monopoly power, Steve Bannon — the Breitbart boss who was President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and still has his ear — has said he wants Facebook and Google to be regulated like utilities. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has said that Google should be.

That would be a disastrous mistake. Imagine direct government interference with the formerly free flow of information over the internet. That such an overreaction would even be considered shows how high the stakes are. If Google, Facebook and Twitter want to survive in something approaching their present form, the companies need to accept meaningful regulation — and be far more on guard about their platforms being used nefariously.

Such caution needs to extend beyond tech firms. The ease and speed with which information, fake or otherwise, spreads around the world makes everyone vulnerable to manipulation. It shouldn’t have taken the 2016 election cycle to make this obvious, but it did — and now it’s time for Americans and American institutions to guard against an encore.

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