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WASHINGTON: A Senate panel is asking the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to defend their handling of disinformation in the contest between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden. But senators are deeply divided by party on the integrity and results of the elections themselves.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday (November 17) to question Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey about their companies’ actions surrounding the controversial elections. The two CEOs of social media are expected to testify via video.
Prominent Republican senators, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have refused to dismiss Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about voting irregularities and fraud, even as misinformation disputes Biden’s victory. has flourished online.
Graham, a close ally of Trump, has publicly urged: “Don’t give in, Mr. President. Fight hard.”
Zuckerberg and Dorsey promised lawmakers last month that they would aggressively protect their platforms from being manipulated by foreign governments or used to incite violence around election results, and they followed through with high-profile steps that angered Trump and his supporters.
READ: Twitter and Facebook suspend some accounts as misinformation about US elections spreads online.
Twitter and Facebook have put a disinformation label on some of Trump’s content, most notably on his claims linking voting by mail to fraud. On Monday, Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet that proclaimed “I won the election!” with this note: “Official sources called this election differently.”
Facebook also moved two days after the election to ban a large group called “Stop the Steal” that Trump supporters were using to organize protests against the counting of votes. The 350,000-member group echoed Trump’s unfounded accusations of a rigged election that invalidates the results.
During the days after the elections, as the vote counting continued, copycat groups of “Stop the Steal” were easily found on Facebook. As of Monday, Facebook appeared to have made them more difficult to find, although it was still possible to locate them, including some groups with thousands of members.
READ: ‘Worrying calls for violence’ lead Facebook to take down fast-growing pro-Trump group
Cautiously observing how companies exercise their power to filter speeches and ideas, Trump and Republicans accuse social media companies of anti-conservative bias. Democrats criticize them too, albeit for different reasons. The upshot is that both parties are interested in removing some of the protections that have protected tech companies from legal liability for what people post on their platforms. Biden has wholeheartedly endorsed such action.
But it’s the actions companies have taken around the election that are likely to be a dominant focus in Tuesday’s audience.
The Republican majority on the judicial panel threatened Zuckerberg and Dorsey with subpoenas last month if they did not voluntarily agree to testify for Tuesday’s hearing. Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee criticized the two CEOs and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, at a hearing last month for what they said was a pattern of silencing conservative views and giving free rein. to political actors from countries like China and Iran.
Despite security fears in the lead up to Nov. 3 and social media companies preparing for the worst, the elections turned out to be the safest in U.S. history, federal and state officials from both parties say, repudiating Trump’s unsubstantiated accusations of fraud.
Facebook insists that it has learned its lesson from the 2016 elections and is no longer a conduit for disinformation, voter suppression and election disruption. This fall, Facebook said it removed a small network of accounts and pages linked to Russia’s Internet Investigation Agency, the “troll factory” that has used social media accounts to sow political discord in the United States since the 2016 elections. Twitter suspended five related accounts.
READ: Twitter, Facebook flag Trump’s posts on the eve of the US elections
But critical outsiders, as well as some of Facebook’s own employees, say the company’s efforts to tighten its safeguards remain insufficient, despite having spent billions.
“Facebook only acts if they feel there is a threat to their reputation or their bottom line,” says Imran Ahmed, executive director of the Center for Combating Digital Hate. The organization had lobbied Facebook to remove the “Stop the Steal” group.
There is no evidence that the social media giants are biased against conservative news, posts or other material, or that they favor one side of the political debate over the other, the researchers have found. But criticism of the companies’ policies and their handling of election-related misinformation comes from both Democrats and Republicans.
READ: Facebook Extends Ban on US Political Ads One More Month
Democrats have focused their criticism primarily on hate speech, misinformation, and other content that can incite violence, prevent people from voting, or spread falsehoods about the coronavirus. They criticize CTOs for not policing content, blaming platforms for playing a role in hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism in the United States. And that criticism has extended to his efforts to stamp out election-related false information.
