Social media liability shield attacked
Republican lawmakers on Tuesday attacked one of the legal protections most prized by social media companies such as Google and Facebook, questioning whether they should be held liable for content posted by users.
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., asked representatives from the companies and Twitter at a committee hearing about their exemptions from liability and why they “should be treated differently than” companies such as hotels that face some legal responsibility for illegal actions on their properties.
The hearing, which comes as tech companies face increasing pressure in Washington, focused on “social media filtering practices” and followed an April hearing that examined alleged silencing of conservative voices on the platforms. Goodlatte tied the purported silencing to another criticism of the companies — their size and question of whether they dominate markets. He asked whether conservative users would not “complain as loudly” if it were easier to go to another service.
Representatives of the companies said the liability protections allow them to remove
objectionable content such as child pornography without facing the sort of rules publishers must face. They added that the variety of online services that consumers use suggests they do not have undue control over markets.
This year, Goodlatte helped pass one of the first laws to weaken the two-decades-old protections if websites knowingly facilitate sex trafficking.
The companies cited scheduling conflicts for missing the April hearing. It featured two conservative personalities, known as Diamond and Silk, whose Facebook page had been deemed “dangerous” by the social media company. Facebook has said the determination was in error and has hired Republican former Sen. Jon Kyl to advise them on potential anti-conservative bias.
While Facebook has conceded the possibility of such bias, Twitter’s senior strategist for public policy, Nick Pickles, testified Tuesday that accusations against his company “are unfounded and false.” Pickles has cast Twitter’s recent moves to fight bots and abuse as an effort at “improving the health of the public conversation” by policing “bad conduct” rather than particular views.
The hearings come as tech giants face public backlash on issues ranging from political affiliations to privacy and Russia’s use of social media to meddle in the 2016 election.
Brad Parscale, President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that Facebook and Twitter are inherently biased against the president and his supporters but that social media is still an “important way to get people to show up to vote for Trump.”
Facebook, he said, is “a liberal company” whose “employees have bias.”
Parscale added that he believes Facebook management is trying to stamp out that bias.
Google has received criticism from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, who in May tweeted the “disgrace” of results that linked the California Republican Party to Nazism. Google said “vandalism” of a Wikipedia page that it used to provide answers had resulted in “erroneous information” that was taken down.
“When you absorb the content, aren’t you absorbing the responsibility?” Rep. Darrell Issa, a San Diego County California Republican viewed as close to the tech industry, asked Google’s director of public policy and government relations, Juniper Downs, during the hearing.
“We have protections in place to protect our services,” Downs responded. “Our systems didn’t catch it in time in this instance.”
The company also plans to answer committee chairmen who recently questioned access by outside app developers to Gmail users’ messages.
Facebook, meanwhile, has faced intense scrutiny, including over Russia and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political data firm obtained the data of up to 87 million users of the site without their permission. It faces probes by the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April, during which some Republicans floated the possibility of regulating the company.