The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tech CEOS grilled on extremism, fake news
Google, Facebook and Twitter face tougher scrutiny after riots.
Lawmakers are interrogating the chief executive officers of Google, Facebook and Twitter onthursday on the role their companies have played in promoting extremism and spreading misinformation.
It’s not the first time Google’s Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey have testified. But the focus on misinformation and extremism is newly relevant after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
The hearing is taking place via video call, led by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. They want to pin down the CEOS on how their companies helped foster the environment that led to Jan. 6, and grill them on how anti-vaccine groups and COVID-19 skeptics have used social media to push medical misinformation during the pandemic, according to people familiar with the lawmakers’ preparations for the hearing.
“My main question to them is what are you going to do to prevent disinformation from spreading and leading to racial tensions, attacks on the Capitol and conspiracy theories like the ones that are spread about the vaccine,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-new Jersey, chair of the committee. “What are you going to do to prevent these real-life consequences?”
Republicans on the panel will have a different set of goals. More than half of the representatives on the two subcommittees organizing the hearing voted against certifying the 2020 election. Those pol
iticians are likely to accuse the CEOS of censoring conservative viewpoints.
The companies have taken steps in the last year to reduce conspiracy theories on their platforms. Facebook and Twitter both removed thousands of groups and accounts promoting baseless conspiracy theories after harboring them for years. And all three platforms suspended Trump in the days after the Capitol riots, a major break from their long-held position that political leaders are granted a newsworthiness exception.
Democrats and progressives want them to go further. And Republicans are pushing back at the actions they’ve already taken.
Much of the debate over how to police social media platforms centers on a decades-old part of communications law called Section 230, which shields companies from liability for content posted by their users.
Zuckerberg has proposed some changes that he thinks are fair: requiring companies to publicly explain how they enforce their rules around content, and holding them liable for illegal activity on their platforms — like selling drugs or spreading child pornography. Any new rules should apply to giant platforms and not small ones, to avoid making it too difficult for upstarts to compete, he said.
Twitter and Google have generally been more reticent about opening up the law, which they and many free speech and open web activists say is vital to preserving Internet freedom.
Onthursday, Google’s Pichai and Twitter’s Dorsey said they’d be open to some changes to Section 230. Pichai said Zuckerberg had some “good proposals” and that the company would “certainly welcome legislative approaches in that area.”