The House Oversight and Reform Committee announced on Monday that Google, Twitter, and Facebook will send representatives to testify at an upcoming hearing on election security.
According to The Hill, the officials will likely field questions about their companies’ efforts to stave off disinformation and manipulation ahead of the 2020 presidential election after facing enormous scrutiny for allowing bad actors to take advantage of their platforms in 2016.
The hearing, held by the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on National Security, will examine the “security of the nation’s election systems, including the government’s response to ongoing attempts by malicious actors to interfere in our elections, influence public opinion, and undermine U.S. electoral processes,’’ according to the committee.
The hearing announcement reads:
“The hearing will also examine the important role of state and local governments, as well as private sector partners, to protect U.S. election security systems, infrastructure, and technology platforms.”
Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security; Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook head of cybersecurity policy, and Kevin Kane, the public policy manager at Twitter will be some of the witnesses.
Lawmakers and experts started paying more attention to technological giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter mostly after the U.S. presidential election which exposed the U.S. democracy system as vulnerable to misinformation mostly from Russian troll farms.
After that, the platforms themselves invested in election security a lot. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg even testified before Congress for the affairs with Facebook about personal data of millions of users. Each of the tech giants claimed that foreign actors make efforts to influence elections and that they are doing everything in their power to prevent stuff like this.
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