Focus sharpens on tech giants
Sessions, state attorneys to meet this month
The Justice Department wants to know if social media companies are stifling the exchange of ideas.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to meet with state attorneys general later this month to discuss whether tech companies may be “intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas,” the Justice Department said Wednesday in a statement.
The announcement comes a week after the White House said it would explore regulating Google — and minutes after senior executives from Facebook and Twitter finished testifying before a Senate panel on the companies’ efforts to stem the tide of misinformation on the platforms.
Agency spokesman Devin O’Malley said the meeting also will consider whether tech platforms “may have harmed competition” with their actions, a hint that the Justice Department may be weighing antitrust action against the firms.
The meeting, which had been in the works since before Wednesday’s hearing, is expected to take place in Washington on Sept. 25 — and at least three state attorneys general have agreed to participate, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record and declined to say which states were involved.
The Justice Department’s announcement significantly heightens the stakes for the tech companies in Washington, where policymakers have widely criticized the digital platforms but have refrained from passing legislation or launching probes into their conduct.
It also raises fresh questions about whether President Donald Trump’s own rhetoric may undercut the Justice Department’s efforts. In recent days, Trump has said the companies may find themselves in a “very antitrust situation,” accusing Google and Facebook of “suppressing” conservative viewpoints.
But the White House is not supposed to interfere with the law enforcement activities of independent agencies.
Twitter and Google declined to comment on the Justice Department announcement. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the hearings Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Facebook and Twitter executives assured Congress that they are aggressively working to root out foreign attempts to sow discord in America, and they pledged to better protect their social networks against manipulation during the 2018 midterm elections and beyond.
Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, testified before the Senate intelligence committee in the morning, but there was an empty chair for Google parent company Alphabet, which refused to send its top executive.
In the afternoon, Dorsey went before a House panel alone to address Republican concerns that Twitter is censoring conservatives. Dorsey denied that is happening.
Sandberg’s appearance came several months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified at highly publicized Capitol Hill hearings.
Like Zuckerberg, she acknowledged Facebook’s lag in recognizing Russian efforts to manipulate Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential election. Sandberg detailed Facebook’s efforts to fight the problem with new technology and manpower.
“We are even more determined than our adversaries, and we will continue to fight back,” she said.
Dorsey was candid with both committees about what his company needs to improve, while defending Twitter against allegations of bias.
Holding his phone throughout the hearings, Dorsey tweeted some of his
opening statement to the Senate: “We aren’t proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people, and our nation. We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we’ve acknowledged.”
He added: “Abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, misinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles — that’s not a healthy public square. Worse, a relatively small number of bad-faith actors were able to game Twitter to have an outsized impact.”