Tech's make-or-break two months

With new attacks by President Donald Trump, high-stakes testimony Sept 5 on Capitol Hill, and a midterm election vulnerable to online manipulation, tech’s giants are bracing themselves for two months after Labor Day that could decide whether and how much the government regulates them. The companies — led by Facebook and Google but with Twitter, Apple, and Amazon also in the mix — are caught in a partisan vise, between privacy-oriented critics on the left who fear further election interference and newer charges from the right of anti-conservative bias and censorship. We spoke with people at the big companies to map the cases they expect to make publicly and privately:

• Facebook: We’re at the table. We’re willing to accept some regulation. We don’t have all the answers.
• Google: Our algorithms have no politics.
• Twitter: We’re listening to users and working with the authorities. We’re being more transparent about political ads. And we’re cracking down on fake accounts.
• Apple: We don't sell your info. We don't have a social network. We're pro-privacy.
• Amazon: We don’t do elections. We're not a social network. We pay fair wages.

The bottom line: The companies are all adopting different versions of a “we’re different from all the others” strategy, and that could let aggressive legislators divide and conquer them on the road to regulation.