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- Jack Dorsey was called out for tweeting during a congressional hearing about misinformation online.
- The Twitter CEO tweeted a poll that appeared to mock the simple "yes or no" answers lawmakers demanded.
- Rep. Kathleen Rice told Dorsey that his "multi-tasking skills are quite impressive."
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Twitter boss Jack Dorsey on Thursday was busted tweeting a saracastic poll during a congressional hearing about misinformation on social media platforms.
Lawmakers grilled Dorsey, as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, about their sites' handling of vaccine misinformation, election fraud claims, and online extremism.
Congress asked the three CEOs to answer "yes or no" to a range of complicated, extensive questions. Lawmakers sometimes interrupted if the CEOs tried to give longer answers.
During the hearing, Dorsey took a jab at the tactic by tweeting a poll that was simply a question mark, asking Twitter users to vote "yes" or "no."
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Democratic Rep. Kathleen Rice picked up on Dorsey's tweet and asked him: "Mr Dorsey, what is winning, yes or no, on your Twitter account poll?"
Dorsey said that "yes" was in the lead. Rice replied: "Hmm, your multitasking skills are quite impressive."
At the time of publication, the poll has more than 97,000 votes.
While facing Congress, the 44-year-old was also liking tweets that pointed out lawmakers were mispronouncing Pichai's name, as well as cutting off the CEOs mid-sentence.
Dorsey, who founded Twitter in 2006, confirmed to another Twitter user that he was barefoot in the hearing.
Dorsey also retweeted a Twitter user's post that said: "It would be awesome if some Member engaged [Jack] in a substantive discussion on Twitter's 'protocols' idea." Dorsey tweeted about Twitter's protocols idea before the hearing. He said the company had started working on a decentralized, open-source social media protocol called Bluesky, which could allow users to build their own media platform that is solely owned by them.
Social-media platforms have faced heavy scrutiny over the past year for the way they have policed misinformation during the pandemic, particularly during the presidential election and the Capitol riots. The five-hour long hearing on Thursday was the first time the tech CEOs had faced Congress since President Joe Biden's inauguration.
Twitter said March 1 that it would ban users who repeatedly post misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on the platform. It also said tweets that contain misleading information would be labeled.
One month before the election, the company said it changed some features to prevent the spread of false political claims, including prompting users to post a comment about a tweet before retweeting it.
Lawmakers in Thursday's hearing said the changes to the platform didn't go far enough. They could still easily find anti-vaccine content on both Twitter and Facebook, Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the House subcommittee on Communications and Technology, said, per CNN.