For two years, Alex Stamos was the Facebook executive tasked with defending the company’s systems against Russian interference and other critical threats.

Now the former chief security officer, who left the social network in August, says Facebook — and the technology industry — needs a systems of checks and balances to help it weigh the complex decisions Silicon Valley companies are making in areas including security and democratic expression.

On Tuesday, Stamos plans to announce the creation of an initiative to do that, in some of his first public remarks since leaving Facebook and joining Stanford University as an adjunct professor and Hoover fellow.

“There aren’t processes to thoughtfully think through these trade-offs,” he said in an interview ahead of his talk at the university’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. “You end up with these for-profit, very powerful organizations that are not democratically accountable, making decisions that are in their best and often short-term interest … without there being a much more open and democratic discussion of what these issues are.”

He hopes the new initiative, called the Stanford Internet Observatory, will help unite “sometimes warring factions” of academia, tech companies and Washington policymakers to work together to help solve “the negative impacts technology can have on society,” he said.

The Observatory will aim to assist technology companies in their investigations — “a bridge between multiple platforms fighting the same problems,” he said — by sharing data and providing more transparency and accountability to their security challenges.

The viral spread of phony news and disinformation during the 2016 election season prompted growing scrutiny of the technology industry and also rising awareness within key companies that their platforms can fuel extremism and could even tilt the outcome of elections — all far from the original vision of social media.

Silicon Valley is attempting to grapple with these issues in the absence of legal requirements, clear precedents or even widely accepted principles on how to act. Stamos was in the middle of these often-contentious debates, within Facebook and as its representative in meetings with government officials and outside researchers.

Stamos’ planned remarks, titled the “Battle for the Soul of the Internet,” amount to something of a public debut for the former executive, who has stayed largely under the radar since leaving Facebook following internal friction, including disagreements about how best to combat the Russian disinformation campaign and other emerging threats such as junk news. At Facebook, he played a key role in combating the 2016 Russian influence campaign, which reached nearly 90 million U.S. Facebook users. He is among the half-dozen executives who have departed the social network this year.

Silicon Valley has made strides in battling disinformation since the Russian interference, Stamos said. But foreign hackers could still alter the outcome of an American election, including the coming congressional midterm vote.

The top risk comes from the type of cyber-espionage that Russia’s military intelligence agency used two years ago to steal emails from the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton then selectively leak embarrassing documents. Stamos called the tactic “hack and leak” and said it sparked controversy and news coverage that undermined Clinton’s campaign in the final days of a closely fought election.

“That’s a fundamental weakness of an open society,” Stamos said. If Russians hacked a major politician’s emails and leaked them to an organization like WikiLeaks today, “nothing concrete would change,” he said. “You can’t prevent the hack-and-leaks, so you’re going to have to deter it.”

Alex Stamos