Social media CEOs to face grilling from senators

WASHINGTON — Less than a week before Election Day, the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google are set to face a grilling by Republican senators who accuse the tech giants of anti-conservative bias. Democrats are trying to expand the discussion to include other issues such as the companies’ heavy impact on local news.

The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing Wednesday. The executives have agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas.

With the election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views.

The chorus of protest rose this month after Facebook and Twitter acted to limit dissemination of an unverified political story from the conservative leaning New York Post about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, an unprecedented action against a major media outlet. The story, which was not confirmed by other publications, cited unverified emails from Biden’s son Hunter that were reportedly disclosed by Trump allies.

Trump, asked by reporters about the companies Tuesday as he left Washington for the campaign trail, said they are trying to suppress revelations of Joe Biden’s “corruption.”

“They don’t want to show corruption, like you have with Biden. That’s totally corruption, and everybody knows it,” Trump said. “It’s very unfair. Nobody has ever seen anything like this. It’s not freedom of the press, it’s the opposite.”

Social media giants are also under heavy scrutiny for their efforts to police misinformation about the election. Twitter and Facebook have slapped a misinformation label on content from the president, who has around 80 million followers. Trump has raised the prospect, without evidence, of mass fraud in the vote- by- mail process.

Beyond questioning the CEOs, senators will examine proposals to revise long- held legal protections for online speech, an immunity that critics in both parties say enables the companies to abdicate their responsibility to impartially moderate content.