Mark Zuckerberg faces a tense grilling in Washington DC next week over Facebook’s handling of election misinformation and its sanctions against Donald Trump during and after the 2020 US election.
The 36-year-old chief executive will testify alongside Twitter boss Jack Dorsey on Tuesday in a virtual Senate hearing on “censorship, suppression and the 2020 election”, chaired by one of President Trump’s biggest allies.
Lindsey Graham, who leads the Senate’s judiciary committee, scheduled the meeting after Twitter and Facebook imposed warning labels on posts by Mr Trump and other Republicans that falsely claimed he had won the election.
The two chief executives had originally been summoned in order to explain why they squelched a negative New York Post story about Joe Biden and his son last month, sparking widespread accusations of anti-conservative censorship.
It comes after a fateful seven days for both companies, in which the President’s all-in bet on largely unsubstantiated allegations of mass vote rigging pressed them to effectively designate his main campaign message as dangerous misinformation.
As broadcasters such as Fox News turned their back on Mr Trump, cutting away from footage in which his campaign continued to claim victory, Facebook deleted groups and pages representing hundreds of thousands of his supporters, while Twitter repeatedly blocked users from sharing his tweets.
Thomas Kadri, a law professor at the University of Georgia who studies how social networks enforce their rules, said that this year had been a “game changer” in finally forcing tech giants to accept their role as what Mr Zuckerberg has called “arbiters of truth”.
Mr Kadri said: “It’s become a lot harder for the platforms to say, with a straight face, ‘we just can’t do this’. Mainly through the pandemic, but also now the election, they have undercut their own ability to make those kinds of arguments.
“We’ve moved into a realm where the platforms are engaging in all sorts of highly editorial decisions… the more they’re dealing with the high-profile political questions surrounding these warnings, the more they start to seem like traditional broadcast and journalism media.”
That is significant because American social networks benefit from not being classified as publishers under “section 230, an ageing internet regulation that is now under sustained attack from both parties.
On top of the anger of Mr Trump’s allies, Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Dorsey may face arguments from Democrats that they did not do enough to limit viral rumours, many amplified by the President himself, that drew armed protesters to counting centres across the country.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain locked in a virtual battle of whack-a-mole as new conspiracy theories pop up, often in the form of video live streams, which are harder to track and police than text posts. Some originated with the QAnon movement, which has been plunged into confusion by the ongoing silence of its prophet “Q”.
What is Section 230?
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer and now director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, called last week “the most intense online disinformation event in US history – and the pace of what we have found has only accelerated.”
Mr Biden’s campaign criticised Facebook for failing to act earlier against pro-Trump media outlets that have helped spread false stories accusing it of turning a blind eye to past misbehaviour for fear of offending Republicans.
Mr Zuckerberg will also be questioned about Stop The Steal, a pro-Trump group devoted to misinformation about election fraud that swelled to more than 300,000 members within 24 hours before being shut down because its members had begun encouraging violence.
Some fear that the hearing may itself become a vehicle for election fraud claims in the hands of seasoned social media critics such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Mr Hawley has tacitly boosted Mr Trump’s narrative, as has Mr Graham.
A similar hearing aired days before the election was described by Democrat senator Brian Schatz as a “sham” after it descended into a verbal boxing match. Some Republicans seized on claims of liberal bias to undermine the protections intended to stop Mr Trump from calling the election early, as he eventually did.
Mr Cruz, who has long accused Big Tech unfairly censoring conservative voices, himself received a warning label on November 8 for a video in which he claimed that “there would be recounts” and that “President Trump still has a path to victory”, suggesting that postal votes are more likely to be tossed out.
According to Mr Kadri, however, the hearing is unlikely to produce any legal danger for tech giants. Mr Biden would struggle to pass any reforms to section 230 without control of Congress, and the two parties disagree profoundly as to whether social networks censor too much or too little.
Even then, he said, Facebook and Twitter’s warning labels, which range from pointing users towards authoritative information to stating that a given piece of content is disputed or not true, would probably be protected under the US’s First Amendment, which guarantees free speech to people and corporations alike.
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