Top executives from Twitter and Facebook sought to reassure US lawmakers on Wednesday Sept 5 that they can better protect users from election interference from foreign sources as the November midterms approach The move comes amid increasing global focus on matters related to online privacy and data security and as the idea of regulating social media is gaining currency Members of Congress asked Sheryl Sandberg chief operating officer of Facebook and Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter questions that involved such topics as foreign interference hacking privacy and text and images and video that are branded as truthful but turn out not to be The two executives told lawmakers that they had made great strides cleaning up their sites and services ahead of the 2018 midterms according to The Washington Post The stakes are high if a bit contradictory The enactment of new European privacy laws in May has led to similar efforts in the United States and elsewhere along with various technical and marketing issues with seemingly increasing support from consumers Yet those consumers still use free online marketing services and continue shopping more online handing over increasing amounts of data to digital firms And social media platforms have an obvious interest in playing nice with lawmakers given the regulatory threats that hover over their business models Slow Action We were too slow to spot this and too slow to act Thats on us Sandberg told lawmakers on Wednesday This interference was completely unacceptable It violated the values of our company and of the country we love Dorsey echoed that point according to reports and coverage Required changes wont be fast or easy he said Today were committing to the people and this committee to do it openly Missing from the hearings was Larry Page CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Among the issues raised by lawmakers was the accusation that algorithms suppress conservative voices and ideas on social media We wouldnt be having this discussion if there wasnt a general agreement that your company had discriminated against conservatives Rep Joe Barton a Republican from Texas told Dorsey on Wednesday Dorsey rejected that view Looking at the data we analyzed tweets sent by all members of the House and Senate and found no statistically significant difference between the number of times a tweet by a Democrat is viewed versus a Republican even after our ranking and filtering of tweets has been applied he said Though the focus Wednesday was on Congress other sectors of federal government are getting more involved in digital privacy issues In February for instance the Federal Trade Commission FTC accused the PayPal-owned Venmo payments app of misleading consumers about its security as well as making it too difficult to change privacy settings As a result PayPal agreed to change its disclosures to more clearly explain how to limit the sharing of transaction details Now executives at PayPal are reportedly deciding whether they should remove the option to post and view public transactions on Venmo Fake Accounts On Wednesday meanwhile Sandberg said Facebook is getting better at letting users know of fake accounts and ads according to an account in The New York Times She raised the example of an event in Washington DC that was promoted by an inauthentic account When Facebook detected the account the company took down the event and notified users who indicated their interest in attending Beyond the issues that directly related to politics which are playing a larger role in the privacy and data security issues as the Cambridge Analytica Facebook controversy showed some lawmakers warned about coming social media regulation Congress is going to have to take action here said Sen Mark Warner Democrat from Virginia The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end The foundation of that regulation will be data privacy he said But will regulators really rule or will consumers A recent PYMNTS column from Karen Webster one that looked at the general issue of who really governs online platforms argued that regulators and policymakers are revving their engines and are today taking or threatening to take action against innovators but that such regulators are not necessarily responding to consumer complaints Data Security The hearings came as tech companies are stepping up their data privacy efforts Specifically they have been lobbying officials within the Trump White House to begin crafting a federal privacy law which would overrule the California law and put in place less stringent rules that would give the tech companies more leeway in how they use their customers personal data In May during a board meeting for the Information Technology Industry ITI Council Joe Kaplan the top lobbyist for Facebook said the California proposal threatened the industry and that fighting it should be the number one priority reported the paper Kaplan warned the California proposal could spread to other states and become a regulatory mess At that point the tech companies came together as it became clear that a federal rule would be better Indeed Europes General Data Protection Regulation GDPR Californias similar law Facebooks ongoing costs and stock price plunge in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal all point to a new stricter attitude about keeping online data private But there are still contradictory trends within all that According to a recent PYMNTS story one reason for that is because humans concepts of privacy are tied to physical spaces not virtual ones and culture and values have yet to catch up