Social media giants reject Republican claims of bias
As the chief executives of Twitter and Facebook gave assurances of vigorous action against election disinformation, Republicans at a Senate hearing yesterday accused the social media companies of political bias, and attacked their business practices and market dominance, laying the ground for curbs on their longheld legal protections.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg defended at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the safeguards against the use of their platforms to spread falsehoods and incite violence in the contest between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.
Responding to concern from Democrats on the panel, they pledged continued vigorous action for two special elections in Georgia that could determine in January which party controls the US Senate.
Republican senators, including committee chairman Senator Lindsey Graham, revived complaints of censorship and anti-conservative bias against the social media platforms.
The actions that Twitter and Facebook took to quell the spread of disinformation have angered Trump and his supporters, many of whom
have echoed Trump’s unfounded claims of voting irregularities and fraud.
Pressed repeatedly about whether Twitter had acted as a publisher rather than a communications company in a judiciary committee hearing, Dorsey insisted it had only enforced its terms of service as “distributor” of information.
Zuckerberg rejected claims that Facebook had acted like “state-run media announcing the party line”, saying it is not a publisher because it does not create or pre-select the content posted by its users.
Social media firms have long fought against being labelled as publishers because this would make them legally responsible for anything on their sites, in the same way as newspapers.
Twitter and Facebook have largely failed to stop the spread of false information despite flagging a string of misleading posts by Donald Trump, data from the two firms show.
The pair used fact-checking labels on a string of outbursts by the President, as he sought to dismiss his electoral defeat by Joe Biden, as part of a wider strategy to limit the spread of false news.
But Twitter said its overall efforts had only led to a 29 per cent reduction in “quote Tweets”, or shares of the posts featuring a user’s own commentary, from those labelled with a fact-checking warning.
On an internal message board, a Facebook data scientist said warnings that posts included misleading or false claims had reduced their spread by just 8 per cent.