(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
Here are some of the highlights :
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., used part of his time to claim that the real issues dealing with social media are “violence and hate speech,” not political bias.
“Here’s the truth: violence and hate speech online are real problems. Anti-conservative bias is not a problem,” Markey said. “The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down. The issue is they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.
An important exchange
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) questioned the two about their censorship of the story:
Sen. Johnson: For both Mr. Zuckerberg and Dorsey, who censored, censored the New York Post stories ,or throttled them back, do either one of you have any evidence that the New York Post story is part of “Russian disinformation,” or that those emails aren’t authentic? Do any of you have any information whatsoever they are not authentic or they are Russian disinformation? Mr. Dorsey.
Dorsey: We don’t.
Sen. Johnson: You don’t? So why would you censor it? Why did you prevent that from being disseminated on your platform that is supposed to be for the expression of ideas, and particularly true ideas.
Dorsey: We believed it fell afoul of our hacking materials policy. We judged —
Sen. Johnson: But what of them … was hacked? They weren’t hacked.
Dorsey: We judged in the moment that it looked like it was hacked materials —
Sen. Johnson: You were wrong.
Dorsey: — surfacing, and we updated our policy and our enforcement within 24 hours.
Sen. Johnson: Mr. Zuckerman — or Zuckerberg?
Zuckerberg: Senator, as I testified before, we relied heavily on the FBI’s intelligence and alerts us, both through their public testimony and private briefings and alerts they gave us.
Sen. Johnson: Did the FBI contact you and say the New York Post story was false?
Zuckerberg: Senator, not about that story specifically.
Sen. Johnson: So why did you throttle it back? Why did you throttle it back?
Zuckerberg: They alerted us to be on heightened alert around the risk of hack-and-leak operations. … To be clear on this, we didn’t censor the content. We flagged it for fact-checkers to review and pending that review, we temporarily constrained its distribution to make sure that it didn’t spread wildly while it was being reviewed. But it’s not up to us either to determine whether it’s Russian interference nor whether it’s true.
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