Four senior Democrats have written to 25 tech companies, including Rumble, SpaceX, and President Trump’s own social network, Truth Social, telling them to take down more “false election-related content” before the November 3 midterm elections.
The letter, dated October 19, 2026, and announced on October 20, was signed by the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, Mark Warner and Jim Himes, and their counterparts on the Senate Rules and House Administration committees, which oversee elections, Alex Padilla and Joe Morelle.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The letter says that the companies’ platforms “create vectors for foreign adversaries and domestic actors to easily and quickly reach–and manipulate–large audiences.”
Warner, Himes, Padilla, and Morelle claim that there are “concerning signs of backsliding on some of your commitments to protecting elections from misuse of your products.”
On Russia, the letter states, “Public reporting indicates that Russia continues to undermine confidence in U.S. elections through disinformation campaigns executed directly on many of your platforms; though such efforts clearly violate your terms of service, some of your companies have not quickly or consistently removed such content.”
As for the companies’ own rules, the letter states that “some of your content removal and fact-checking policies are woefully insufficient or even nonexistent, allowing false, manipulated, and misleading content to continue to circulate on your platforms unchecked.”
The letter mentions the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which, the lawmakers note, “has notably pursued enforcement actions against companies that don’t live up to the self-regulatory commitments they make.” As an example, they cite a 2012 case when the FTC took action against Google.
The letter also criticizes the companies for layoffs in the “trust and safety” sector, saying that “Refusing to grow and expand your election integrity teams–and even shrinking these teams–does not support your stated commitments to countering harmful election content and suggests to bad actors that your policies are not enforceable.”
The letter goes into some detail about what the signatories expect from the companies going forward. They want them to “Immediately remove all demonstrably false information related to election and voting logistics upon becoming aware of it.”
The companies should also give election officials “dedicated reporting tools” to report false election information, use “independent fact checkers in addition to internal fact-checking teams and regularly updated automated tools to review and remove, or at least reduce the reach, impressions, and discoverability of, false, misleading, or inauthentic election-related content.”
The platforms should also “Notify users when they have engaged with election-related content that has subsequently been determined to be false, misleading, or inauthentic,” “Affirmatively direct all users to authoritative election-related resources,” and give “third-party researchers” access to “your products and data, including data on how users are engaging with your platforms on election-related issues.”
The AI companies received a separate set of instructions. Their chatbots should provide answers about voting only based on “highly authoritative sources” and not “social media platforms or other user-generated content.”
Those sources, the letter continues, “should be limited to state and local election offices and top trusted news organizations, as well as civil society organizations aggregating content from these other authoritative and reliable sources.”
The companies should “Strengthen guardrails to prevent AI systems from responding to queries with material that can be used in election disinformation campaigns” and keep auditing answers “until the November federal elections, and for an appropriate time as ballot counting, litigation, or challenges to the results remain ongoing.”
The letter says that the companies must be able to tell election misinformation apart “from ordinary political speech about elections,” but it never clarifies who makes that call, and the word “misleading” used throughout the letter could cover more than just a wrong polling date.
The effort to push for more censorship on the internet ahead of the November election is not new – and it’s not the first time that Warner is trying to rally the big tech companies to do the government’s bidding in this way.
We previously reported that before the 2020 election, the FBI was holding weekly meetings with the big social media platforms, while the Election Integrity Partnership, formed at the request of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) CISA, was flagging posts to them.
That same year, the FBI warned these companies about a “Russian disinfo” dump – and the Hunter Biden laptop story got suppressed as a result. But we later learned from FBI testimony that the agency knew the laptop was real.
In September 2024, Warner wrote a similar letter, claiming that “foreign actors, including Russia, China, and Iran” were trying to influence that election, and urged more government work with tech companies to combat “election misinformation.”
Unlike in 2020, the 2024 effort did not result in a massive censorship campaign.
In April 2025, the National Science Foundation (NSF) cancelled hundreds of grants for “misinformation” research, including that of the University of Washington.
In March 2026, the government signed a consent decree in the case Missouri v. Biden, agreeing that “applying labels such as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ or ‘malinformation’ to speech does not render it constitutionally unprotected.”
With the government’s own channels to the companies largely closed, four senior lawmakers are now asking the companies to build the same machinery themselves.
While the government is not directly involved, a letter from the top Democrats on the intelligence committees is not something a company can easily ignore.
The last time the government leaned on platforms over election “disinformation” it was the true story about the Hunter Biden laptop that got buried.
