After giving in to the looming threat of subpoenas, two of tech’s most high profile CEOs will again be grilled by Congress.
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will host Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for what’s likely to be another multi-hour airing of assorted grievances. In this round, Republican lawmakers called the hearing to press the tech titans on “Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election.” The hearing, which was scheduled before the election, was apparently inspired by the platforms’ decisions to limit the reach of a dubious New York Post story presenting leaked information purporting to implicate now President-elect Joe Biden and his son Hunter in a corrupt political influence scheme in Ukraine.
If the last hearing is any indication, and it likely is, Tuesday’s tech vs. Congress showdown will be less about cornering the two tech platform CEOs on the stated topic than it will be a far-ranging complaint session about Republicans’ ongoing complaints about anti-conservative bias punctuated by bipartisan soliloquies on lawmakers’ various pet topics. While that hearing, held last month in the Senate Commerce Committee, was ostensibly about Section 230 reform, the pressing policy issue barely came up.
Tuesday will be the first post-election Congressional appearance from social media leaders, so we can also expect a war of competing political realities. In one, President Trump, unfairly assailed by tech and the media alike, is somehow still a contender for the presidency. In the other reality (the real one), President-elect Joe Biden won the election decisively but his victory remains mired in social media misinformation. The latter scenario has played out in spite of a mixed bag of special tools and rules devised by Twitter and Facebook to rein in looming post-election conspiracies.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is led by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former Trump critic turned hype guy who has urged the president not to concede the election. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican who broke rank to recognize the reality of the election results, will also have a turn at Zuckerberg and Dorsey. Democrats on the committee include a generous sprinkling of contenders for the 2020 nomination, including Senators Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and now Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who is doing transition work and unlikely to be present.
If you’re interested in subjecting yourself to Tuesday’s proceedings, you can watch the hearing live on the committee’s own page or on C-SPAN Tuesday at 7AM PT. If you’re not, and we can’t exactly suggest it, circle back after things are over and we’ll catch you up. But before we leave you, one question: How does YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki keep staying out of these things?
