Thread by @issielapowsky

If Senators actually do their jobs during this hearing, we could get answers to critical questions about the efficacy of Facebook and Twitters' election defenses.

But I don't have high hopes. protocol.com/post-election-…

And we're off. In opening remarks, Graham asks: "If you're not a newspaper at Twitter or Facebook, then why do you have editorial control over the New York Post?"

Note: Not republishing something from the NY Post is not the same as having editorial control over the NY Post.

Some rational thinking from Graham: "I don't want the government to take over the job of telling America what tweets are legitimate and what are not."

Oh dear, I didn't expect that we would be taking Sam Cooke's words in vain this morning. "When it comes to social media platforms and Section 230, change is going to come." - Graham

"Google has been given a pass from today's hearing. It's been rewarded by this committee for its timidity doing even less than you have done to live up to its responsibilities." - tell 'em why you're mad Sen. Blumenthal.

"There are real harms and real victims here, and in some ways this hearing is a betrayal of those real harms, the real victims of those harms." Blumenthal says.

Zuck: "At last year's hearing...last *month's* hearing..."

Have never felt so much kinship with Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuck begins with a laundry list of FB's pre/post election efforts and tries to one up the other companies. "I believe this was the largest election integrity effort by any private company in recent times."

"My wife Priscilla and I personally donated $400 million to support election officials around the country..." - Zuck

This is a subtle, but major burn. What Zuck didn't say: That's as much as Congress allocated to states for their election efforts.

Graham was beating around the bush asking questions clearly pulled from The Social Dilemma. Now he's just like: Have you guys seen that movie?

Zuck says he's familiar with it and Dorsey says he hasn't watched.

Both Dorsey and Zuck reiterate that they support change to Section 230.

TBH, a fairly reasoned round of questioning from Graham that covered a lot of common ground around the need for transparency in content moderation.

Blumenthal now doing the inverse of what his R colleagues are going to do.

Blumenthal: Will you commit to taking down the account of Steve Bannon?

Zuck: Senator, no. That's not what our policies would suggest that we should do.

Zuckerberg also denies reporting that Facebook has reverse strikes against conservatives like Don Jr.

Here's @oliviasolon's original scoop nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

This is some significant detail from Zuck on what he's proposing re: transparency regulations. Of note: this would be easier for a huge company like Facebook than for lots of its smaller competitors.

Come on Sen. Feinstein. So close. Ask them how they will know if these labels worked. By what measure? Will they share what they know?

Has...Mike Lee heard of the Kenosha Guard? buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanma…

Mike Lee is asking questions about why ads from American Principles Project were fact-checked on Facebook. That same group was behind a series of anti-trans texts spreading misinfo about Biden that I first reported about here protocol.com/biden-transgen…

Where are Lee's questions about Facebook's labels even supposed to lead?

Your reminder that: Whether FB were a publisher or a platform, it'd be allowed to editorialize about mail-in voting. The only that's not allowed is the government prohibiting that speech.

Can someone with a law degree please help me understand what Section 230 has to do with election warning labels? These labels aren't third-party speech.

NEW: Zuckerberg called on Congress to impose transparency and efficacy standards on tech platforms related to content moderation, standards some like @IfeomaOzoma argue would give Facebook a competitive advantage over smaller platforms. protocol.com/zuckerberg-con…

"We will always be working to help minimize the prevalence of harm. In the same way that a city will never eliminate all crime." - Zuckerberg

Dorsey says he's unsure if Twitter blocked Edward Snowden's disclosures. Cruz tells him "the answer's no."

Neither one of them mention that Twitter's hacked materials policy was created in 2018.

And lo, here's the loophole. Twitter and Facebook can label voter fraud misinformation on their platforms, but Ted Cruz can sit on this committee, with so many cameras trained on him, and repeat those same statements as fact.

Adding Jeff's reply to my thread: With 230, platforms can still be liable for their own speech (ie. their warning labels), even if they're protected from liability for others' speech. The senators know this.

https://twitter.com/jkosseff/status/1328745033999278081?s=20

Sasse: "I especially think it's odd that so many in my party are zealous to do this right now, when you would have an incoming administration of the other party that would be writing the rules and regulations about it."

Zuck, answering Sasse's question about internal political slant at Facebook. "I do think it's undisputed that our employee base, at least the full time folks politically would be somewhat or maybe more than just a little somewhat to the left of where our overall community is."

This sounds right from Sasse. But it's also worth noting that widespread labels like this are a pretty new thing! It's hard to argue that these companies put labels on election misinfo but not some other kind of misinfo because they *just* started applying these labels at all.

"I do think like anything else, these tools can be addictive and we should be aware of that and acknowledge it." - Dorsey

Hawley doesn't hear himself, does he? He just called the following teams Facebook's "censorship" teams: the community well-being team, the integrity team and the hate speech engineering team.

Hawley promoted this "whistleblower" disclosure about an internal FB platform called Tasks as if he had a smoking gun about coordination between FB, Twitter and Google. Instead, he just asks Zuckerberg whether such coordination exists.

Zuck's response:

Oh snap...Klobuchar asks *Dorsey* about Facebook's decision to cut off Vine. "I don't know the specifics, and the tactics and what was done, but we did find a very, very challenging market to enter, even though we existed prior to some of our peers, doing the same thing."

Klobuchar asks about FB sending a cease and desist to the NYU Ad Observatory. Zuck asks Klobuchar if she's talking about "the project that was scraping the data in a way that might have violated the consent decree that we have with the FTC?"

Reader, he knows the project.

Too many quaranbeards on this committee for my liking.

Tillis says he "fully expects that Congress is going to act in the next Congress, that we're going to produce an outcome," despite divisiveness in Washington.

Zuck's answer to Ernst's question about Facebook diversifying the political makeup of its staff: "This is a sensitive area and I don't think it would be appropriate for us to ask people on the way in...what their political affiliation is."

No one who thinks seriously about online privacy is still shocked by Facebook's (or any company's) ability to track people across the internet. We're years past shock about online surveillance and years into Congress's failure to do anything about it.

Remarkably, four hours into this thing, @maziehirono is the first to ask Zuck and Dorsey: "What evidence do you have that these labels are effective in addressing President Trump's lying?"

Both say they're studying it now.

Booker asks if FB or Twitter have modified their algos so "blatantly false election disinformation ... don't somehow get boosted by your algorithms." Good Q but he kind of cuts Zuck off before he answers that question. Dorsey says yes, some labels do impact amplification.

Welp thanks for joining me for another installment of...hm we don't seem to be getting anywhere, now do we?