U.S. officials are enjoying “dramatically better” cooperation with social media companies in the wake of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, according to FBI director Christopher Wray.
“The flow of information back and forth between law enforcement and the intelligence community and Silicon Valley, I think, has gotten dramatically better,” Wray said Friday at the Council on Foreign Relations.
American technology companies are traditionally skeptical of government and reluctant to provide information to federal officials. But the aftermath of the 2016 election, with public uproar over Russian influence operations on the internet, motivated social media companies to ensure “that their own platforms are not abused” by foreign governments in the future. Russian use of social media platforms to spread propaganda and “sow divisiveness and discord” among the American people “continued pretty much unabated” throughout the 2018 elections, Wray said, but U.S. tech companies were much more proactive about stopping such operations.
“There were a lot of success stories in the midterms,” Wray said. “Some of these companies were taking pretty aggressive action on their own — voluntarily, not at our behest or requirement — to enforce terms of use,” including “shutting down and kicking off accounts” involved in foreign influence operations.
Twitter attracted attention throughout 2018 for suspending millions of accounts deemed fake. “One of the biggest shifts is in how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety, said in July. “Free expression doesn’t really mean much if people don’t feel safe.”
Wray’s comments come as Silicon Valley is under pressure on multiple fronts. Besides social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter being under fire for their use in Russian disinformation campaigns during the 2016 and 2018 elections, Facebook also faces multiple investigations into how the company takes advantage of the private data of its users.
“I would say our relationship with Silicon Valley is complicated, but I think we are having increasingly positive interactions with them,” Wray said.
His examples of heightened cooperation focused chiefly on social media companies. Some U.S. officials are frustrated with other technology companies, such as Google, which has ended projects with the Pentagon while continuing strategically sensitive projects in China, where the technology could ultimately be taken and used against the United States.
“We don’t always agree on everything, but we’re not experiencing, that I can think of, any company that just says we don’t want to work with you,” Wray said.
