| Hey everyone, it's Sarah Frier. Representatives from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google will appear in a virtual congressional hearing today to explain all they've done to protect us from the kind of coordinated misinformation effort Russia pulled off in 2016. Across the board, they've come up with solutions for finding networks of fake accounts, especially those peddling divisive content seeded by foreign governments. They have policies against messages that discourage people from voting, or spread the wrong details about the election. They have more experienced staffs and tighter relationships with the U.S. intelligence agencies, so they can trade tips and coordinate responses. In short, if the 2016 election happened now, the tech companies would be able to catch the bad guys. But it's not 2016, it's 2020. And the information ecosystem is more complicated and evolved. People call out "fake news!" about messages that are true, and shout "bots!" when they see commentary they disagree with. Politicians claim tech bias on both sides. Some of the recent genuinely fake news campaigns originated domestically, not in Russia. And the president himself frequently edges close to breaking the rules meant to protect users. On May 26, Donald Trump posted the unfounded claim on Facebook that voting by mail would result in massive fraud. He said the governor of California would send ballots to anyone in the state "no matter who they are or how they got there," and claimed that "professionals" would then tell people in the state who to vote for. "Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed," Trump wrote. Facebook bans content that misrepresents whether a vote will be counted, or the methods for registering to vote. So we asked why, in a previous edition of this newsletter, this post had no warning on it—even though Twitter put a fact-check link on the same message on its site. On Wednesday we heard the answer. "That's debate between politicians," said Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs. He said it wasn't Facebook's place to weigh in. Which goes to show, as much as tech companies prepare for the elections, the new rules, policies and procedures they testify about today won't matter nearly as much as their enforcement, and the exceptions they might make for the president. The companies weigh their content decisions alongside other considerations like regulatory risk and public perception. At Facebook, Clegg said, "for the most difficult decisions, there is one ultimate decision-maker, our CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg." —Sarah Frier | 
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