the “Prague Spring” democratic movements, had itself become a victim of Soviet disinformation efforts immediately before Moscow crushed the Czechoslovakian democratic activity by military force. Forty-six years later, on March 30, 2017, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held another hearing to explore Russia’s active measures and the role of Russian disinformation in the United States’ democratic process, including the 2016 election. The Senate committee convened twenty-one days after the House of Representatives held a similar hearing on Russian disinformation and its efforts to splinter NATO. The Department of Justice report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election published three years later would note that Russian online disinformation included efforts, through fake accounts and other means, to support then-candidates Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders (I- V), with Russian directives clarifying, “We support them”.9 The Justice Department indictment against Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) would also highlight the organization’s support for candidate Jill Stein (Green Party).10 The public hearings about Russian efforts to use disinformation to sway the 2016 presidential election did not include former Intelligence Chiefs from adversarial states like Congress had interviewed in 1971, but the hearings highlighted similar disinformation strategies, tactics, and targets, with a new element that would begin a spike of new hearings in Congress: the role of social media companies in facilitating state actor disinformation and influence operations.
Congressional Response Before the 116th Congress, most hearings about the role of social media companies and disinformation mentioned the technology companies obliquely, as a mechanism for information distribution like other forms of media. A few Congressional hearings between 2002 and 2007 mentioned the role U.S. internet service providers (ISP’s) and social media websites had played in spreading the ideology of violent extremists and recruiting
11
9
United States Department of Justice, “Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Vol. I. March, 2019. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.
10
See: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, LLC. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 371, 1349, 1028A. February, 2018 https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download.
Crisis and Congress: Technology, Information, and the Future of Governance
