Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey brace for election 'techlashing' in Senate Judiciary hearing

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey brace for election 'techlashing' in Senate Judiciary hearing



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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where they will face questions as divided as the nation, with Republican senators pelting the tech CEOs for alleged anti-conservative bias and Democrats for their platforms’ handling of hate speech and misinformation. 

Tuesday’s congressional hearing – the second virtual appearance for the CEOs in less than three weeks – reflects growing bipartisan pressure on “Big Tech.”

It also comes at a particularly fraught moment as President Donald Trump continues to use social media to make unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud and to contest Joe Biden’s victory. 

Dorsey and Zuckerberg appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee alongside Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, on Oct. 28, to defend their companies against blistering attacks over the moderation of conservatives’ posts.

Researchers have found no evidence that Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservative voices or viewpoints. But during that hearing, Republican lawmakers alleged the tech companies engaged in politically motivated suppression of New York Post articles on the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter in the lead-up to the election and warned they may strip away decades-old legal protections that shield tech companies from liability for what users post on their platforms.

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Tuesday’s hearing was originally billed as an indictment of how tech companies handled the New York Post stories but will now focus more broadly on their handling of the election.

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The GOP majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee threatened Dorsey and Zuckerberg with subpoenas if they didn’t appear voluntarily for the hearing.

Despite federal and state officials declaring the election the most secure in U.S. history, prominent Republican senators have refused to challenge Trump or the misinformation about the election spreading online. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently urged Trump: “Do not concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.”

The broadsides from the left also intensified before Tuesday’s hearing. On Monday, more than a dozen Democrats raised the alarm about anti-Muslim bigotry on Facebook. 

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., urged Facebook to be more transparent about hate speech and how it enforces its policies.

“Facebook is a groundbreaking company that has revolutionized the way we communicate. Unfortunately, the connectivity that can bring people together in many positive ways also has been used to dehumanize and stoke violence against Muslims, Black people, Latinos, immigrants, the Jewish community, Sikhs, Christians, women, and other communities here and across the world,” senators wrote. An October report from Muslim Advocates called Facebook “the World’s Engine for Anti-Muslim Violence.”

These are some of Zuckerberg and Dorsey’s talking points

Dorsey plans to point to his company’s election update last week. According to the update, Twitter labeled about 300,000 tweets that were disputed or misleading, about 0.2% of all election-related tweets, the company said. Twitter also slapped a warning message on 456 tweets and limited their spread, including many by Trump, his campaign and surrogates.

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“More than a year ago, the public told us they wanted Twitter to offer context on misleading information. This is the exact approach we’ve implemented on Tweets about COVID-19, synthetic and manipulated media, and the 2020 US election that could contribute to offline harm,” the company said last week. “We continue to apply labels to add context and limit the risk of harmful election misinformation spreading without important context.”

Zuckerberg plans to point to his company’s record get-out-the-vote drive that registered millions and recruited poll workers as well as its efforts to combat misinformation and voter suppression. He also plans to reiterate his willingness to work with lawmakers to update “the rules of the road” for the internet as has been proposed in recent bipartisan proposals to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Were emergency measures enough to stop misinformation?

The unprecedented nature of the 2020 election thrust Facebook and Twitter into the role of aggressively combating misinformation from labeling social media posts to limiting their spread, including the president’s. 

Twitter has stopped covering up claims disputing the election results, instead placing a smaller label underneath tweets that the content is disputed and linking to election information. On Monday, the company added this note to a Trump tweet claiming he won the election: “Official sources called this election differently.”

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After the election, Facebook shut down a fast-growing pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” group calling for “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote” over “worrying calls for violence.” The Facebook group, which attracted more than 350,000 members and nearly 7,000 posts in two days, was being used to organize protests with the rallying cry that Biden was trying to steal the election.

The company continues to flag problematic content with a label saying Biden is the projected winner. Facebook also extended its one-week ban on political and social issues ads to a month to prevent ad campaigns disputing election results.

But these emergency measures have not been aggressive enough to rein in the torrent of election misinformation, some researchers say.

Putting labels on debunked claims and not limiting their spread is a “weakness in the protections the companies have in place,” said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. 

In many cases, the platforms put labels on falsehoods, including from the president, but did not apply more “friction” so the social media posts still went viral, said Stamos, Facebook’s former security chief.

“We have a real problem here that the companies are not dealing with,” he said in a press briefing last week.

Former President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, that the populism drummed up by Sarah Palin, including “appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies,” has been accelerated by social media. He says he does not hold the tech companies solely responsible but says they’ve “turbocharged” the latest surge of misinformation.

“The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable,” Obama said. “They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.”

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