In the Senate hearing just now, @jack says Twitter realized it was wrong to lock the NY Post's account over the Biden story tweet, but couldn't unlock it without the Post deleting the tweet because "we did not have a practice around overturning prior enforcement actions.” 
Without implying any defense of the NY Post, the ability to overturn a mistaken enforcement decision seems like.... a practice that Twitter probably should have had prior to October 2020.
What are the chances both FB and Twitter have secret backchannels with U.S. intel sources, and that's why they both arrived at the same conclusion on the NY Post story so quickly and why neither will explain how?
https://twitter.com/evelyndouek/status/1328722736928133120?s=20
Zuckerberg is practically begging the Senate to regulate social media content moderation so that the company can stop getting vilified by one side or the other for every decision it makes and point to someone else's rulebook instead.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey both just told the Senate that they would like to see Section 230 reform of some sort.
Sen. Lindsey Graham just asked both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey whether they've seen The Social Dilemma and then told them they should go watch it. 😳
Mark Zuckerberg says he's "familiar" with The Social Dilemma. Jack Dorsey says he has not watched it.
Sen. Blumenthal presses Zuckerberg on reports Facebook has bent its fact-check rules for conservative outlets. E.g.: washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
Zuck: "We haven’t done that, and I think those reports mischaracterize the actions we take." But then he adds...
Zuck: "We haven’t done that, and I think those reports mischaracterize the actions we take." But then he adds...
"What we do sometimes is apply some judgment on whether the repeat offender policies would render too harsh of a penalty." — Zuckerberg threading the needle on reports it has bent its fact-checking rules to avoid angering conservative outlets
Sen. Durbin asks Zuck about the "operational mistake" in which the company ignored or overruled hundreds of user reports of the militia group that organized the deadly Kenosha event. Zuck says its anti-militia policy was new & some moderators "had not yet been trained on that."
I wrote at the time about how Facebook could have avoided that "operational mistake" if it cared enough to make content moderation a full-time job, rather than outsourcing much of it to third-party contractors. onezero.medium.com/how-facebook-c…
Asked about its Silicon Valley-based employees' generally leftward political leanings, Zuckerberg says it means "we need to be careful and intentional internally to make sure that bias doesn’t seep into decisions that we make."
Interestingly, Zuckerberg cites the "geographic diversity" of Facebook's (mostly contracted) content moderation workforce as a countervailing political influence to its more liberal full-time employees in Silicon Valley. Seems... awfully convenient at best.
This is a nuanced point but I've long argued that a lot of Facebook's problems stem from Zuckerberg's naive view of "neutrality" as a goal and "bias" as something that can be stamped out. In journalism terms, Zuck is espousing what @jayrosen_nyu calls the "view from nowhere."
Zuckerberg's persistent attachment to neutrality as a goal leads inevitably to "both sides" thinking, and precludes even a conversation about what Facebook actually values and how it could achieve that. In the absence of any values, what you have is an amoral profit machine.
Sen. Josh Hawley is often billed as the Republicans' rising star on tech policy, so it's a little distressing that he insists on characterizing Facebook's hate speech and site integrity teams as its "censorship teams."
Can someone *please* haul YouTube in front of Congress if only to free @evelyndouek from the Sisyphean duty of having to yell this from the rooftops in vain every day.
https://twitter.com/evelyndouek/status/1328755659345702921
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