- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday at 10 a.m. Eastern.
- Lawmakers are expected to grill the tech CEOs about how their platforms moderated content before and after Election Day.
- The hearing was scheduled last month after Facebook and Twitter temporarily restricted the spread of a dubious and unverified New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which made its way to the Post through Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer.
- Republicans have accused the tech platforms of anti-conservative bias for that content moderation and for fact-checking false claims made by Trump, while Democrats have urged tech companies to crack down more harshly on misinformation.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning to answer questions about their platforms’ handling of the 2020 election.
The two tech CEOs were summoned by Senate Republicans who were upset with the tech platforms’ content moderation before and after the election. Facebook and Twitter have both added labels to posts made by President Donald Trump falsely claiming victory in the election — which he lost — and spreading misinformation about voter fraud.
Republicans have argued that those warning labels amount to anti-conservative censorship, while Democrats have called on tech companies to more robustly crack down on misinformation. On both sides of the aisle, lawmakers say tech companies should face more legal scrutiny.
The hearing comes as Republican leaders scramble to bolster Trump’s evidence-free claims of a widespread conspiracy to “rig” the presidential election. Senate Judiciary chair Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican, has taken an outsize role in that push — Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State said Monday that Graham pressured him to find ways to discard legally-cast ballots as the state conducts a hand recount this week.
Lawmakers are also expected to grill Zuckerberg and Dorsey about whether their companies should retain legal protections afforded by Section 230, a law that shields social media sites from being held liable for users’ posts in the way that publishers are responsible for content they produce.
"When it comes to social media platforms and Section 230, change is going to come," Graham said in his opening statement at the hearing Tuesday.