How Big Tech is preparing for midterms

Let’s talk about midterms

Some tech companies are eager to tell everyone about their work around the midterms. Others are taking a quieter approach.

Twitter and Google are getting ready for the upcoming elections. Google is making changes to Gmail, and Twitter’s ready to fight election misinformation.

• Twitter said yesterday that it’s reviving tools to take down false and misleading election posts. It’s also applying its civic integrity policy, introduced in 2018 to stop users from posting misleading claims about elections, to the midterms.
• Google’s trying to make sure campaign emails stay out of your spam folder after it was criticized for marking too many Republican campaign emails as spam.

Meta is mostly keeping quiet and hasn’t shared anything other than this one-page outline.

• That’s quite different from how it approached the 2018 election, when the company offered tours of its election response war room.
• Two New York University researchers, one of whom planned to investigate the spread of disinformation around the Jan. 6 insurrection, had their access to Facebook revoked by Meta.
• Meta’s also sunsetting CrowdTangle, its tool used for fact-checking and research, and the number of people working on the company’s core election team has dwindled.
• “They’re not talking about it,” former Facebook policy director Katie Harbath told The AP. “Best case scenario: They’re still doing a lot behind the scenes. Worst case scenario: They pull back, and we don’t know how that’s going to manifest itself for the midterms on the platforms.”

It remains to be seen whether Meta has something more up its sleeves, or if it’s taking itself out of the elections narrative. If it plays out anything like the 2020 elections, though, even if companies set up the most stringent protections and talk about them at every opportunity, they might find themselves face-to-face with lawmakers anyway.

— Sarah Roach

The FTC’s data crackdown

​The FTC announced yesterday that it’s taking steps toward cracking down on commercial surveillance and lax security.

That includes exploring new rules around companies “collecting, analyzing, and profiting” from user data. FTC Chair Lina Khan said that the FTC is for now just asking whether it even should regulate in some specific areas.

The effort will likely draw pushback from business and tech groups, Protocol Policy reporter Ben Brody told me. Companies could try to argue that consumers get utility from the data practices in place.

• They could also say that Congress — not the FTC — should make these decisions.
• Congress has notoriously dragged its feet on tech regulation, though there has been some movement: The House recently advanced a major data protection bill out of committee.

This kind of rulemaking could have sweeping effects on tech and other industries. The FTC is also probing data collection practices in social media, cybersecurity, AI and health care.

• But it’s still early days, and the FTC could take a narrower approach in the end.
• “I don’t think any eventual rules will take on all those, but I do think there will be some rules somewhere — and they could take on almost any of those topics,” Ben told me.

For now, the FTC is asking tons of broad questions around everything from biometrics to algorithmic discrimination. The road ahead could be long, but the effort could lead to much tighter limits on how companies can take and use your data.

— Nat Rubio-Light

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People are talking

Telegram’s Pavel Durov called the App Store’s review process “obscure”:

• “It’s not just demoralizing: It causes direct financial losses to hundreds of thousands of mobile apps globally.”

• “What we want to do now is to be able to allow you still to paint the Mona Lisa, but in this case to be able to do so in a secure fashion.”

Making moves

Paddy Srinivasan is GoTo’s new CEO. He was previously the company’s chief product and tech officer.