Facebook and Twitter executives plan to defend their companies in two congressional hearings, arguing that they are aggressively trying to root out foreign actors who want to do the United States harm just weeks before the midterm elections.
Twitter's CEO will also face angry Republicans who claim the companies have shown evidence of bias against conservatives.
In prepared testimony released ahead of a House hearing on Wednesday, 5 September, afternoon, Jack Dorsey says his company does not use political ideology to make decisions.
Congress has sharply criticised the social media companies over the last year as it has become clear that they were at the forefront of Russia's interference in the 2016 elections and beyond. That scrutiny has led to additional criticism over the companies' respect for user privacy and whether conservatives are being censored – frustrations that are particularly heightened ahead of the midterms.
The companies have made progress, the government has made progress, but the bad guys have made progress as well.Mark Warner, Virginia Senator
Senator Mark Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, which will hear from both companies in the morning on the subject of foreign interference. Warner has proposed a series of ways the companies could be regulated for the first time.
The afternoon hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Committee will feature only Dorsey in a hearing focused on bias and the platform's algorithms.
Some Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have pushed the idea ahead of the elections that Twitter is “shadow banning” some in the GOP because of the ways search results have appeared. Twitter denies that is happening.
Missing from the conversation will be Google, which refused to make its top executive available for the Senate intelligence hearing. The panel invited Larry Page, the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, but the company said it would send a lower-ranking executive instead. The committee rejected that offer, and is expected to have an empty chair at the hearing for Page.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Tuesday that Google doesn't "understand the problem" if it doesn't want to work with the government to find solutions.
The back-and-forth with Google is the latest in a year's worth of attempts by Congress to force the companies to focus more sharply on the Russian interference issue.
While Burr says he believes Facebook and Twitter do understand the problem, it took both companies several months last year to acknowledge they had been manipulated.
It also underscores how difficult the problem may be to solve. While the companies have made many changes around their policies and have caught and banned hordes of malicious accounts over the past year, their business models – free services that rely on attracting as many users as possible for as long as possible and finding out as much about them as possible – remain the same. Some critics have charged that unless they change this, they will continue to contend with bad actors taking advantage of their systems.
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