Facebook and Twitter grilled over US election actions

Facebook and Twitter’s chief executives are being cross-examined by US senators for the second time in three weeks.

The two were summoned to answer questions about how their platforms had limited distribution of a controversial article about Joe Biden’s son published ahead of the US election.

But they are also being challenged over their handling of posts by President Trump and others who have contested the vote’s result.

The tech firms face new regulations.

In particular, President-elect Biden has suggested that protections they currently enjoy under a law known as Section 230 should be “revoked”.

It says the platforms are generally not responsible for illegal or offensive things users post on them.

Mr Biden has said this allows them to spread “falsehoods they know to be false”.

Republicans have also voiced concern about the law. They claim it lets social media companies take decisions about what to leave up and take down without being transparent about why, making bias possible.

“When you have companies that have the power of governments, have more power than traditional media outlets, something has to give,” said the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

‘Frivolous lawsuits’

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey both addressed the issue in their opening remarks.

Mr Dorsey urged the politicians to work with Twitter to avoid changes that might cause “the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, and severe limitations on our collective responsibility to address harmful content”.

Mr Zuckerberg added that any update must preserve “the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things”.

The two tech CEOs also defended their record in handling the 2020 election.

But Mr Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter’s decision to block links to the New York Post article about Hunter Biden had been “wrong”, and that its failure to subsequently restore the newspaper’s own tweets about the story had required a further policy change.

BBC