Silicon Valley's trust is on the line at U.S. congressional hearings

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When Silicon Valley executives head to Capitol Hill this week to testify before committees investigating Russian meddling in last year's presidential election, the congressional grilling is expected to offer a rare public glimpse into the inner workings of the world's most powerful technology companies.

But beyond a public thrashing over how much tech firms knew about an apparent Russian internet campaign, and how they plan to prevent foreign political interference in the future, will be the question that social-media companies likely fear the most: Can Silicon Valley be trusted?

Top lawyers for Google, Facebook and Twitter are set to testify Wednesday before public hearings of the Senate and House intelligence committees that are investigating what role Russian-backed agents played in influencing the 2016 election.

The congressional hearings come as the U.S. government's criminal investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and the Russian government, led by former FBI director Robert Mueller, appears to be intensifying across several fronts.

A number of media outlets reported that charges against at least one person were filed Friday and arrests could come as soon as Monday.

Tech companies have found themselves unwittingly drawn into Mr. Mueller's probe, which has a broad mandate to investigate any possible criminal activity turned up while investigating links between the Russian government and the Trump presidential campaign. Facebook confirmed it has handed over details of the Russian-bought ads to Mr. Mueller's investigation.

Silicon Valley has increasingly become a flashpoint in the U.S. political debate over alleged Russian efforts to promote discord and spread misinformation in an attempt to sway voters toward Mr. Trump. Admissions by some of the world's largest social-media giants that their platforms may have been manipulated by a foreign government – and that Russian agents had spent relatively little to target millions of U.S. voters with politically charged advertisements – may prove to be the tipping point that ushers in new regulations on the industry. Until now, it has largely been able to persuade Washington that it has the tools to police itself. ​

Amid mounting pressure from both lawmakers and the public to disclose the extent of Russian efforts to buy political influence through digital advertising, the three tech behemoths in recent weeks collectively revealed that hundreds of user accounts suspected to have ties to the Kremlin purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars in political advertising around last November's election. These ads were viewed by tens of millions of Americans. Many of the ads focused on stoking divisions over hot-button issues such as immigration, gun control or Black Lives Matter.

Legislators, including the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Mark Warner, and Republican Senator John McCain, have introduced a bill that would require websites with more than 50 million monthly views to keep public archives of political ad campaigns, including who paid for the ad and what kinds of users were targeted. Such rules already apply to broadcasters and print-media organizations, but online companies have been exempt.

At its core, however, the debate will be over whether to regulate companies such as Facebook and Google as neutral third-party platforms – technology companies with little control or responsibility over what gets published – or as media companies who should be held accountable for the content published by advertisers and billions of users.

"The last thing in the world that any of them want is to become a publisher," said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California. "There isn't the manpower in the world available to monitor the content on social platforms."

Silicon Valley has long fought hard to stave off regulations that would place it in the same class as traditional media companies. The web has been "virtually unregulated" in the United States since a landmark 1997 Supreme Court decision that exempted internet firms from many of the same Federal Communications Commission rules that apply to radio and television broadcasters, said Bill Kovarik, professor of media history and law at Radford University in Virginia.

But the internet has changed dramatically since then and the current focus on Russian political interference could prompt U.S. lawmakers to take another look at the growing influence of social-media firms that didn't exist 20 years ago. "It's true there is no Federal Interweb Commission, for example," Prof. Kovarik said. "Now there could be."

In Europe, privacy and anti-trust regulators have increasingly trained their sights on Silicon Valley social-media giants. Earlier this year, the European Commission slapped Google with a record €2.4-billion anti-trust fine over concerns it unfairly favoured its shopping service over rival price-comparison websites in its search results. Facebook has been sparring with European regulators over data privacy laws, and the British Parliament recently said it wants to investigate whether Russian agents used social media to influence the June vote to leave the European Union.

So far, the allegations of Russian political interference have had little impact on the companies' bottom lines. Google and Facebook dominate global digital advertising, together earning more than $100-billion (U.S.) in online ad revenues last year. But the controversy adds to growing concerns that social-media companies may not have as much control over their burgeoning global empires as regulators and advertisers have come to expect, said Brian Wieser, an ad-industry analyst at Pivotal Research in New York.

"Advertisers, broadly speaking, don't care necessarily about the Russian stuff. They do care about the fact that data may be overstated and it may be unduly influencing how they are planning their budgets," he said. "It's the global impact of not trusting that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing."

In recent weeks, the social-media firms have raced to unveil a raft of new measures aimed at persuading lawmakers the industry is capable of regulating itself.

Facebook pledged to hire as many as 4,000 people to help review content. The social-networking company has also said it would use Canada as a testing ground for new political-ad disclosure requirements and plans to roll out a Canadian "election integrity" program ahead of the 2019 federal election. On Thursday, Twitter announced it would ban Russian media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik from advertising on its platform.

But some analysts believe the congressional hearings might prove to be a turning point for the public conversation around how to police the internet and whether social-media companies have simply become too big to manage their global platforms on their own.

"It's like saying we built an airplane but we can't tell where it's going to fly," Prof. Kovarik said. "The problem we have is getting the technology to fly along a path that is compatible with democracy. To the extent that the companies say they can't do that, they will be regulated."