Here are some of the highlights :
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he believes his employees leans left politically during Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Big Tech. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did not answer whether they believe their employees lean politically right or left. The Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe are all notorious for their leftist progressive employees.
- A Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee said Wednesday during a hearing with social media executives that bias against conservatives “is not a problem.”
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.
- Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Wednesday afternoon to a Senate hearing that they had no evidence that reports about Hunter Biden’s emails were “Russian disinformation,” as claimed by Democrats.
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.
- False claims about the Holocaust are not censored or flagged because it does not fall under three specific misinformation categories that the social media giant regulates.Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained to Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) that Twitter only regulates misleading information about public health (coronavirus-related), election interference and voter suppression, and media manipulation. “We don’t have a policy against misinformation. We have a policy against misinformation in three categories,” Dorsey said. “That is all we have a policy on for misleading information.”
- Senator Ted Cruz said the three tech companies pose the “single greatest threat to free speech in America and the greatest threat we have to free and fair elections.”
Sen. Ted Cruz: "The three witnesses we have before this committee collectively pose I believe the single greatest threat to free speech in America and the greatest threat we have to free and fair elections." #Section230 pic.twitter.com/MW274kMu1X
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) October 28, 2020
