New Issue One report details how Big Tech’s failures empowered foreign adversaries during 2024 election cycle

Today, Issue One published a new report, “Flooding the Gap: How Big Tech’s Failures Empowered Foreign Adversaries and Undermined the 2024 U.S. Election,” highlighting how the design and operations of American social media platforms, compounded with partisan attacks on civil society collaborators, empowered foreign adversaries to wage sophisticated information warfare in the 2024 election. The goal — leverage a broken information ecosystem to divide Americans, undermine our democracy, and threaten our national security. This report analyzes how these vulnerabilities emerged, the strategies foreign adversaries employed, and what Congress must do to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated in future elections.

“The 2024 election revealed a troubling reality: while our election systems held firm, the information ecosystem remains extremely vulnerable to exploitation by foreign adversaries. Big Tech’s retreat from their past election integrity measures, compounded by partisan pressure and insufficient oversight, has left a vacuum that bad actors eagerly filled,” said Issue One Legislative Manager for Technology Reform Jamie Neikrie. “This report should serve as a wake-up call for Congress to stop trusting these companies to safeguard our information ecosystem, and instead enact stronger legislative safeguards to ensure that these platforms cannot be weaponized against Americans.”

“The information ecosystem surrounding the 2024 election was the most vulnerable the country has ever seen,” said Issue One Campaigns Manager for Technology Reform and technologist Liana Keesing.“Partisan actors set out to score cheap points by targeting and chilling the efforts that emerged after the 2016 and 2020 elections to combat foreign malign influence operations. Big Tech broke over 130 promises that they had made to the public, legislators, and regulators about how they would protect national security, elections, transparency, and more. Into the void stepped foreign adversaries — like Russia, China, and Iran — who effectively spread more than 160 false narratives online to divide Americans and undermine trust in core democratic institutions.”

This new report details how Big Tech companies’ decisions to roll back critical internal policies and lay off key integrity teams stifled efforts to combat false information online in the years leading up to the 2024 election. As partisan pressure intensified, targeting both federal agencies and academic institutions, the infrastructure needed to counter false narratives became weaker and the information ecosystem more fractured. Foreign adversaries leveraged these vulnerabilities to divide voters, erode trust in democratic institutions, and influence public opinion, especially during moments of crisis.

The report provides several concrete recommendations about how to increase transparency and accountability on social media platforms so that foreign adversaries cannot exploit the vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem as easily, including:

• Improving the design of technology platforms to create an information ecosystem that nurtures, rather than undermines, American democracy. Congress should pass the Online Consumer Protection Act to require social media platforms to establish, disclose, and maintain written terms of service (including a consumer protection program) and hold these platforms accountable for failures to uphold these terms.
• Increasing research, education, and public reporting on the threat of foreign malign influence operations. Congress should pass the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act to give independent, vetted academic and nonprofit institutions the ability to conduct public data-driven research on tech platforms and establish safe harbor protections for researchers to collect public information from online platforms without fear of intimidation.
• Restricting our adversaries’ influence on social media and in the political process. Congress should pass the Honest Ads Act that improves the transparency of online political advertisements to stop foreign influence in U.S. elections. It should also strengthen the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by increasing penalties, enhancing enforcement mechanisms, and expanding it to specifically cover digital influence activities.
• Holding platforms accountable for disseminating foreign propaganda. Congress should enact legislation that creates annual, mandatory reporting requirements for major tech platforms, with independent third-party audits, and reform the Communications Decency Act to clarify that legal immunity does not apply to internet service providers who fail to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm to our national security or who engage in deliberate attempts to avoid learning about such harm.

Read the full report, “Flooding the Gap: How Big Tech’s Failures Empowered Foreign Adversaries and Undermined the 2024 U.S. Election.”