Tony Romm

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has declined to testify at a rare joint hearing with lawmakers from seven countries, representing more than 368 million people. Instead, Facebook will dispatch Richard Allan, the company’s vice president of policy solutions, to answer questions at a Nov 27 hearing featuring top policymakers from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Facebook said it had removed more than a billion fake accounts and taken action against millions of posts, photos and other forms of content that violated its prohibition against hate speech, terrorist propaganda and child exploitation, the latest sign that the social-networking giant faces an onslaught of online abuse as it builds tools to spot it.

 Even as Silicon Valley has become more aggressive in battling foreign efforts to influence US politics, it is losing innumerable cat-and-mouse games with Americans who are eagerly deploying the same techniques used by the Russians in 2016. “Everyone’s witnessed the playbook playing out,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Now they don’t need Russia so much.

The top executives at Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have stayed on the political sidelines during the 2018 midterm elections, opting not to donate to federal candidates who might advance Silicon Valley’s political agenda — or battle back President Donald Trump. Two years ago, these tech leaders emerged as some of President Trump’s biggest critics, challenging his administration publicly on issues including immigration, climate change and gender equality.

As voters prepare to head to the polls, the tech industry’s talented, well-heeled engineers and entrepreneurs have been plugging into Democratic campaigns around the country.

Facebook announced that it had suspended 82 pages, groups and accounts that originated in Iran for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" and sharing divisive political messages, including opposition to President Donald Trump. The accounts -- some of which also had been removed from Facebook’s photo-sharing site, Instagram -- do not appear to have clear "ties to the Iranian government,” but Facebook could not say for certain who was behind them.

Twitter accounts originating in Iran masqueraded as foreign journalists and concerned US citizens in their attempt to push political messages on the social media site until they were suspended earlier in 2018.

The Federal Communications Commission told the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that it acted properly when it repealed the US government’s net neutrality rules in 2017, marking its first legal salvo in a campaign to battle back 22 states and tech companies including Mozilla, Facebook, and Google that contend the agency’s move was illegal. The FCC said it was perfectly within its right to rethink how it regulated those internet service providers, citing a landmark Supreme Court decision outlining the agency’s powers from 2005.

Facebook said that it has purged more than 800 US publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company’s spam policies, a move that could reignite accusations of political censorship. The accounts and pages, with names such as Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press, were probably domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads, the company said.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai paid a rare visit to Washington (DC) on Sept 28 to defend the company against allegations that it silences conservatives online, part of an effort to defuse political tensions between the company and Congress ahead of a hearing later in 2018. At a gathering with a dozen Republicans, House Majority Leader Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) stressed to Pichai that party lawmakers are concerned about “what’s going on with transparency and the power of social media today,” particularly given the fact that Google processes 90 percent of the world’s searches.