Activists press Congress on CEO hearing
Some of social media’s top challengers have been briefing lawmakers ahead of Thursday’s blockbuster hearing with the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Advocacy groups including Color of Change, Avaaz, Coalition for a Safer Web and the Anti-Defamation League have been privately talking to lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and their staffs about their concerns about disinformation and extremism on social media. Lawmakers and their staff have also been in communication with leaders of Anti-Vax Watch, a collection of people and organizations concerned about the impact of vaccine disinformation.
The briefings and a flurry of new public reports about online harms reflect an effort to influence lawmakers’ line of questioning as they prepare for their first hearing with the chief executives since the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol.
Lawmakers appeared to be interested in cornering the CEOs on the tech companies’ role in creating the conditions for the insurrection, said one person familiar with the conversations, who was not authorized to speak about them publicly.
Another exchange focused on the companies’ ability to enforce their policies against vaccine misinformation, and advocates stressed the urgency for lawmakers to ensure the companies to step up action immediately to save lives during the pandemic, another person familiar with the meetings said.
There’s also a broad effort among lawmakers and their staffs to ensure that they’re nailing questions that don’t give the executives an easy out, the first person said. At past CEO hearings, members of Congress have at times struggled to pin down the executives, who often say they’ll have their staff follow up on complex or controversial matters.
Though CEOs have been appearing on Capitol Hill more frequently, the violent fallout of the 2020 election and the recent push to vaccinate Americans and end the public health crisis have only raised the stakes.
“The reason we’re having this hearing is because the spread of disinformation and extremism has just been growing online, in particularly on social media where there are little or no guardrails,” said Frank Pallone Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee, in an interview. “This stuff doesn’t just stay online.”
Pallone said the committee is considering a wide range of policy moves, including empowering the Federal Trade Commission to better protect consumers or reforming Section 230, a decades-old law that shields tech companies from lawsuits for the content that other people post on their services.
A rush of new reports, briefing documents, letters and data reflect the issues that advocacy groups hope lawmakers address.
Avaaz released a new report that detailed election-related falsehoods on Facebook in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The report concluded that the company was “a significant catalyst in creating the conditions that swept America down the dark path from election to insurrection.”
Coalition for a Safer Web shared a new complaint that was sent to Facebook’s Oversight Board. The letter called on the board tasked with overseeing Facebook’s content moderation decisions to oversee Facebook’s enforcement of policies related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, after researchers said they continued to find posts and accounts that appeared to break the social network’s rules.
Ahead of the hearing, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, released an op-ed in Morning Consult where it touted the company’s work to reduce misinformation across its products. For instance, he wrote that Facebook disabled more than 1.3 billion fake accounts between last October and December.
Twitter has also been highlighting its work to reduce extremism. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy and trust, and safety lead, earlier this month posted a Twitter thread detailing the company’s work in the two years since the attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.