Recode Daily: Facebook pledges to fix its Russia problem and Uber may be banned in London

Facebook will hand over information on Russia-linked ads to Congress, and pledged to make it harder to manipulate future elections. Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook yesterday to share his plans — a shift from his stance last November, when he dismissed the notion that Facebook influenced the outcome of the U.S. election as a “pretty crazy idea.” But Zuckerberg also reaffirmed that Facebook won’t censor users or advertisers in advance of the things they post — an idea that’s core to Facebook's success. Zuckerberg still says he isn’t running for president; read his full speech here.[Recode]

The congressional investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election is already expanding beyond early scrutiny of Facebook. Sen. Mark Warner thinks Russian agents may have used bots to amplify their message on sites like Twitter, Google and Reddit, and intends to have a hearing in October. [Tony Romm / Recode]

London regulators say they will strip Uber of its license to operate at the end of the month, citing “potential public safety and security implications.” [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

Uber has a lot of reasons to settle the lawsuit with Alphabet before its October hearing. Especially after it was revealed that Alphabet is seeking $2.6 billion in damages for a single self-driving trade secret it claims was stolen. By settling, Uber would avoid a potentially messy public trial, avoid new evidence, alleviate legal costs and return its self-driving arm to business as usual. On Uber’s other lawsuit front, its earliest and biggest investor, Benchmark, said it doesn’t intend to sell any shares to the Japanese SoftBank consortium, which would complicate SoftBank’s proposed $10 billion investment in Uber. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

Here’s why Google is spending $1.1 billion to “acqhire” 2,000 engineers from Taiwanese company HTC’s smartphone operations. For starters, hardware is still important to Google, and it can be a great business. And while phones are today’s focus, what’s next — augmented reality? implanted devices? — matters more. Also, HTC needs it. [Dan Frommer and Rani Molla]

Snap is shuffling some top executives inside its secret hardware division. Former Googler Mark Randall is now running the team behind Snap’s video-recording sunglasses, called Spectacles. After the internal restructuring, the company also fired about a dozen employees. [Kurt Wagner]

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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