Tech CEOs to testify before Congress - again

The hearing will deal with disinformation on the world's largest social media platforms

The leaders of Facebook, Twitter and Google will appear before Congress in a hearing on Thursday, to discuss dis- and misinformation on their platforms.

The virtual joint hearing - titled 'Disinformation Nation: Social Media's Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation' - will be held by the Energy and Commerce Committee and two Senate subcommittees at 12 p.m. Eastern Time on 25^th March.

The hearing was announced in February, over a month after the riot in which Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building while lawmakers were attempting to tally votes for the US presidential election.

Later investigation revealed that rioters had organised on social media platforms weeks in advance.

Following the incident, Facebook, Twitter and some other social media firms banned Donald Trump from their platforms over policy violations.

Critics accused Twitter and Facebook of failing to prevent the spread of misinformation, which led to violence in Washington DC.

"Whether it be falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine or debunked claims of election fraud, these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety," the chairs of the two Senate subcommittees holding the hearing said.

They added that big tech companies had failed to acknowledge the role they are playing "in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences".

"Industry self-regulation has failed," they said, and there is a need to "begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation".

The hearing on Thursday is expected to go deeply into incidents where extremists have used social media to plan and organise violence.

In response, Big Tech leaders are expected to outline various measures they have taken in past months to control the spread of disinformation on their platforms.

Twitter said that it was launching a new pilot programme in January as part of efforts to address misleading information on the platform. The company said that the new community-based programme, called Twitter Birdwatch, would allow users to identify such information in tweets and to add notes for informative context about the topic of the tweet.

On Monday, Facebook's vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, announced that more than 1.3 billion fake accounts on Facebook were disabled between October and December 2020, and millions of posts containing misinformation surrounding the pandemic and vaccines were removed in recent months.

"Despite all of these efforts, there are some who believe that we have a financial interest in turning a blind eye to misinformation," Rosen said.

"The opposite is true."

This is not the first time that tech leaders will be appearing before Congress.

In July last year, senior executives of Facebook and Google were hit with tough questions as they appeared in House Antitrust Subcommittee's hearings, to defend against claims that they were abusing their market dominance to crush rivals.

The lawmakers said that some tech firms had become so big that they were threatening competitors, consumers, and even democracy.

In October, the US House Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Subcommittee released the findings of its 16-month-long investigation into the challenges posed by the dominance of tech giants in the digital economy.

The report concluded that Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon were effectively monopolies that needed to be broken up to restore competition and improve innovation in the industry. It also accused the tech giants of imposing harsh contract terms, charging excessive fees and extracting data from customers and businesses.