Hot seat on Hill
F’book, Twitter bigs face Russia query
And you thought grilling season was over.
Top dogs at Facebook and Twitter are getting hauled up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to answer questions about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and to detail what they’re doing now as the congressional midterms crank up.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook operating chief Sheryl Sandberg will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday morning.
Both will speak on the changes they’ve made to their algorithms to snuff out bad actors, according to prepared remarks.
But Sandberg — whose boss Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April, ducking questions about the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal — is expected to insist that tech firms can’t do everything themselves.
“We don’t have all the investigative tools that the government has, and we can’t always attribute attacks or identify motives,” Sandberg’s prepared re- marks state.
That’s despite the fact that Sandberg sits in the C-suite of a $500 billion company with a treasure trove of personal data on more than 2 billion users.
Twitter’s Dorsey, meanwhile, is slated to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in addition to the Senate panel. The tech exec is expected to deny that the company stifles conservative voices on its platform.
“The notion that we would silence any political perspective is antithetical to our commitment to free expression,” Dorsey said in prepared remarks.
He might have a hard time defending that before congressional leaders who remember Dorsey’s interview with CNN last month.
“We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more leftleaning,” Dorsey told CNN.
Google meanwhile, will sidestep the Senate’s skewering. The search giant offered to send chief legal officer Kent Walker in lieu of chief executive Sundar Pichai but was shot down.