Russia's Ukraine invasion, seeded by a web of state-backed disinformation campaigns, is putting Big Tech in a bind, Axios' Ashley Gold reports.

Why it matters: How tech firms respond to Russia's disinformation efforts in real time could shape the role they play in future geopolitical conflicts. But already, experts argue they aren't moving quickly enough.

• "In a way, this will be a test for American social media companies if things really escalate," said Bret Schafer, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Driving the news: Social media firms say they are closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine but so far, companies like Meta, Twitter and YouTube have yet to publicly introduce any new policies tailored to it.

• "Some of the things they've done (in the past) like labeling, or some of the 'think-before-you-share' type interventions, have not been applied to this crisis in particular," said Nina Jankowicz, global fellow at the Wilson Center specializing in disinformation and democracy.

The big picture: Russia is no stranger to social media manipulation, and sharpened its skills ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, said Simon Miles, assistant professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.

• "That told [Russia] a lot about the power of this tool," he said. "What we will probably see is them trying to use social media tools to sow as much panic and chaos from Ukraine as they possibly can."

Of note: While deploying its own disinformation campaigns, Russia has also been among the most aggressive countries in asking tech firms to remove content, imposing fines of $100 million on Google and $27 million on Meta last year for not removing material the government had banned.

• That could make it harder for tech platforms to be rigorous about stopping disinformation campaigns, Justin Sherman, fellow at the Atlantic Council's Cyber Statecraft Initiative, told Axios.
• Last September, both Apple and Meta removed a mobile app created by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny per the government's request, after an aggressive pressure campaign.

Be smart: Most social giants label posts and accounts from state media, but those policies don't address misinformation from everyday users abroad, nor do they address Western outlets and personalities parroting pro-Russian talking points.

• "We are dealing with people in the West who are influential and well-positioned, and who by amplifying some of these messages provide legitimacy, whether it's true or not," said Rita Konaev, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security's Technology and National Security Program.
• Past conflicts in places like Myanmar, India and the Philippines show that tech giants are often caught off-guard by state-sponsored disinformation crises due to language barriers and a lack of cultural expertise.

Yes, but: Even if social platforms put new policies in place, it may once again show "that they are not well-resourced enough in contexts that are non-English speaking and non-Western," Jankowicz said.

What's next: Beyond social media, experts told Axios to expect more cyber warfare perpetuated by Russia on Ukraine, along with more staged or fabricated videos coming out of Russia depicting false events, a practice Russia has ramped up in the past week.

• On Wednesday, several Ukrainian government websites went offline due to a distributed denial of service attack, per CNBC.
• AP reports those attacks continued into Thursday.

Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday detailed several research efforts that it insists are key to its project of building a metaverse.

The big picture: While some of the work, like a new type of haptic gloves, is closely tied to virtual reality, a number of the efforts Meta talked about on Wednesday predate the company's metaverse push and have wide use beyond it.

Of note: Meta touted self-supervised machine learning as a key technology to helping create and make sense of a future with many digital worlds.

What they're saying: "The road to the metaverse goes through AI," Meta AI research managing director Antoine Bordes told Axios.

• Bordes also said that computer vision systems based on self-supervised AI have the potential to be less biased, since humans aren't adding their own labels to the data.

Among the projects that Facebook touted was a language translation system capable of converting texts directly between 100 different languages in real-time without needing to use English as an intermediary step.

• That allows the technology to go "beyond the populations that have been well served with technology," Bordes said — something that wasn't possible two years ago.
• Overall, Meta says that currently more than 20% of the world's population uses a language not covered by commercial language translation systems. "We don't have to wait for the metaverse to happen to have impact," Bordes said.

Between the lines: Facebook tried to paint its work as a contribution to the broader field of artificial intelligence. The company pledged to be transparent about its research as well as to share some of the code through open source releases.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have pressed TikTok about content that promotes disordered eating on the platform, per a letter to the company sent Wednesday shared exclusively with Axios, Ashley reports.

Why it matters: As TikTok's popularity booms, the video-sharing app is getting more attention from lawmakers concerned about content that circulates on the platform that could harm vulnerable teens and kids.

• TikTok executives have previously appeared before Congress to discuss the impact of its platform on young people.

Details: Klobuchar and Baldwin cite Wall Street Journal reporting about TikTok's algorithm serving 13-year-olds tens of thousands of weight-loss videos soon after joining the platform. Their letter notes that TikTok's stream of videos exposes users to harmful content even when they haven't sought it out.

What they're saying: "We are deeply disturbed by this report and believe this content violates TikTok's policies related to self-harm, suicide, and dangerous acts," the senators wrote in a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.

• They asked the company to answer questions by March 9.
• The letter asks TikTok how many of its users have seen content promoting unhealthy eating in 2021, and seeks more information about TikTok's planned changes to its algorithm aimed at preventing it from bombarding users with tons of content on the same theme.

Background: The senators recently introduced a bill to provide training and assistance for health care workers, teachers and parents for identifying eating disorders and supporting recovery.

On Tap

• Today's earnings reports include VMware and Square parent company Block.

ICYMI

• Cloudflare is buying email protection firm Area 1 Security for $160 million in stock and cash. (Bloomberg)
• Google is relaxing some COVID-19 restrictions and apparently walking back a vaccine mandate for U.S. employees. (CNBC)
• California is reconsidering its required use of ID.me as a condition for getting unemployment benefits. (Sacramento Bee)

I don't know what to say about (points everywhere). But here is a supercut of 30 minutes of cute puppy videos.