Twitter and Facebook executives testify before Congress – as it happened
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Your support makes all the difference.Five months after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress, the US government once again invited tech executives to a series of high profile hearings.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey first faced the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, before Mr Dorsey was questioned on his own by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Notably absent from the proceedings was Google, after the firm failed to send a senior executive to Washington. In place of a Google representative, the Senate committee left an empty chair.
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The hearings went slightly better than Mr Zuckerberg's venture to the Capitol in April, when members of Congress needed explanations of some of the platform's basic functions. This time, they challenged the executives with hard-hitting questions about foreign actors and political bias.
The questioning was interrupted several times by conservative media figures like Alex Jones and Laura Loomer. Both were escorted out of the hearing, but continued broadcasting their views loudly to reporters waiting in the hallways.
Mr Pallone wants to know how many content moderators Twitter employs in the US, how much they're paid, and what kind of training they get. Mr Dorsey refuses to give specifics right now, but says the company needs to do a better job of extending protections to private users, not just celebrities.
Mr Dorsey admits that if most people sat down in front of Twitter's rules today "with a cup of coffee," they probably wouldn't be able to understand them.
"I think there's a lot of confusion around our rules and also our enforcement, and we intend to fix that," he said.
Congresswoman Diana DeGette is asking about harassment of women on Twitter. She wants to know if Twitter has data about harassment based on gender and sexual orientation on its platform.
Mr Dorsey says he's planning to work on a "transparency report" this year to make some of this data public.
Mr Dorsey says Twitter was in compliance with the GDPR even before the legislation was passed.
"We do believe that privacy is a fundamental human right," he says, adding that they are working to give users more control over their data.
There was a question about a doctored picture of Meghan McCain, the daughter of late Senator John McCain, that was circulated on Twitter over the weekend. It took hours for the company to take the picture down. Mr Dorsey says he hasn't apologised personally to the McCain family, but he plans to.
Congressman Joe Barton, starting his questioning, says: "You don't look like what a Twitter CEO should look like."
"My mom would agree with you," Mr Dorsey shoots back.
Mr Barton keeps asking whether Twitter discriminates against conservatives, asking different variations on the same question. Mr Dorsey's answer pretty much every time is: "No."
Someone is screaming in the hearing room, though it's difficult to hear what she's saying. She's been ordered escorted out by security.
Mr Dorsey is being asked about whether Twitter will be delete all accounts linked to a "foreign adversary".
He says it's something they're getting better at, but it's not a challenge that has an endpoint. He says the company current identifies 8 to 10m suspicious accounts every week, and challenges them to see if they’re bots or bad actors.
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