Joe Biden was declared the winner of the Nov. 3 election, but President Trump and his conservative allies – some of whom will be at the hearing today – have refused to accept the results, prompting a historic face-off with social media companies trying to bat down disinformation from sitting public officials. Twitter has taken unprecedented action against Trump himself, labeling many of his tweets for spreading false information about baseless election fraud.
That has prompted Republicans to revive long-running accusations with scant evidence that tech companies are biased against conservatives.
Meanwhile, committee Democrats are planning to tear into the tech companies for not doing enough to rein in Trump as he refuses to concede the election. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) plans to tell the executives their actions so far have amounted to “baby steps,” and demand they do more to address “destructive, violence-inciting misinformation,” according to prepared opening remarks shared with The Technology 202.
He plans to dismiss GOP accusations of censorship as a “political sideshow.”
“This hearing is a betrayal of the real victims of the real harms caused by Big Tech,” Blumenthal plans to say. “You have repeatedly and catastrophically failed the American public.”
Tech CEO hearings used to be a rare event — but now they’re happening with greater frequency.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey are back in the hot seats less than three weeks after their last virtual appearance in front of another Senate panel. The back-to-back hearings underscore the expanding political pressure on the companies as they’ve been tested in unprecedented ways by the uncertainty, polarization and misinformation surrounding the 2020 election.
In the time since the executives last appeared before lawmakers, they’ve taken unprecedented steps aimed at reining in misinformation on their platforms. Twitter has slapped dozens of warning labels on Trump’s tweets since Election Day, at times shielding them from view under a gray box and preventing them from being liked or retweeted. Facebook has also applied smaller labels to the president’s posts and disabled some key features, such as political ads.
The chief executives are expected to be on the defensive again.
Dorsey is expected to push back on accusations based on specious evidence the company exhibits bias against conservatives, according to a preview of his testimony.
Dorsey plans to reiterate Twitter’s commitment to fact checking in his prepared testimony, pointing out Twitter labeled about 300,000 tweets in the election’s runup and during the week following the contest.
“We want to be very clear that we do not see our job in this space as done,” Dorsey will say. “Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges and earn the trust of the people who use Twitter.”
Twitter recently pulled the curtain back on that work, saying it has labeled tweets accounting for about 0.2 percent of all election-related content. The company says it recorded a 29 percent decrease in quote tweets, which allow people to retweet posts with their own comment, of labeled content. But researchers argue there’s still not enough available data to determine the effectiveness of such interventions.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg plans to focus on the company’s efforts to combat misinformation and voter suppression, according to Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. He’ll say the company removed false claims about polling conditions in coordination with local law enforcement, as well as displayed warnings on more than 150 million pieces of content reviewed by third-party fact-checkers. He’ll also explain the company’s election labels, which appended information about the election results and voting to posts from both Trump and Biden.
The hearing is a key opportunity for lawmakers to gauge the efficacy of Silicon Valley’s actions.
The last hearing was heavy on political attacks and light on substance. It remains to be seen if today’s meeting will be any different.
Experts studying misinformation say it represents a key opportunity to get answers about the companies’ ongoing work on election misinformation, especially as there are broad questions about its efficacy. Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, had some suggestions:
Our top tabs
Some California voters say they feel tricked by Uber and Lyft’s anti-employee rights ballot initiative.
The voters say they thought that a “Yes” vote on Prop 22 would give workers a minimum wage and other rights. In fact, the ballot initiative exempted gig companies from providing those benefits, Faiz Siddiqui and Nitasha Tiku report.
“I definitely feel deceived,” said Lindsey Schaffran, 27, of Modesto, Calif., who voted in favor of Proposition 22. “We all felt that Prop 22 was going to help the drivers, and Uber and Lyft were going to be paying them more, when really they’re just trying to save their own pockets.”
Labor advocates say that Uber’s and Lyft’s plan to take the legislative model and deep pockets to other states amounts to an assault on workers rights for not just gig workers but all independent contractors.
“Prop 22 showed that companies and big corporations can buy their way out of providing protections for workers under the law,” said Margaret Poydock, a policy associate for the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank.
The Uber and Lyft-backed campaign spent a record-setting $205 million on the “Yes on 22” campaign, outspending the “No” campaign by a 10-to-1 margin.
Uber, Lyft and DoorDash denied claims that they duped voters.
“To suggest that these millions were somehow so feebleminded they voted for something they didn’t want is offensive to voters and flat out wrong,” Geoff Vetter, a spokesman for the Yes on 22 campaign, said in a statement.
Airbnb filed to go public amid steep revenue loss from the coronavirus pandemic.
The company could be valued at around $30 billion, Erin Griffith at the New York Times reports. But the prospectus it filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed a deep hit to its revenue related to the pandemic, possibly shaking some potential investors.
Airbnb brought in $2.5 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2020, a $1.2 billion decrease from the year before. It bounced back to profitability this quarter after more users sought summer getaways.
The company had planned to file in March but then the pandemic wiped out much of its business. It laid off a quarter of its 7,600 employees as a result.
The company painted a picture of growth and resilience for potential investors.
“We believe that the lines between travel and living are blurring, and the global pandemic has accelerated the ability to live anywhere,” the SEC filing says. “Our platform has proven adaptable to serve these new ways of traveling.”
The military is buying commercial location data of unsuspecting Muslim app users.
The military has been scooping up anonymized location data from popular apps including a Muslim prayer app with 98 million downloads, a Muslim dating site and a weather app, Joseph Cox at Motherboard reports.
The findings add fuel to growing lawmaker scrutiny over how the U.S. government, including DHS and the IRS, are using commercial location data with little or no oversight.
The military purchased the data through two vendors: a contractor named Babel Street and the data broker X-Mode. The companies receive location data by paying app companies to installing their software.
Although Babel Street’s data is anonymized, a former employee says the company was capable of deanonymizing the data. Clients have also included government contractors.
X-Mode told Motherboard it licenses data to contractors for “counterterrorism, cybersecurity and predicting future covid-19 hotspots,” Several apps using X-Mode had no idea their users’ data was being passed along to the military.
The military uses the data for overseas operations, Navy Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, told Motherboard. “We strictly adhere to established procedures and policies for protecting the privacy, civil liberties, constitutional and legal rights of American citizens,” he said.
Rant and rave
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Obama also said. “You’re not going to eliminate the Internet.”
His interview also revealed some hot takes on pens.
Trending
Mentions
- Twitter named Peiter Zatko, a hacker widely known by his handle Mudge, as its new head of security, Reuters first reported. Zatko most recently worked at Stripe and has experience working with the Pentagon.
- Lyft hired Sudafi Henry, a former Biden legislative affairs director, and Darrell Thompson, who previously held numerous positions under former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to CNBC.
Daybook
- The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing with Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey about news and censorship today at 10 a.m.
- The Aspen Institute’s Tech Executive Leadership Initiative Launch Event will take place Wednesday 7 p.m. ET.
- The R Street Institute will hold an event “Technology, Policing, and Earning the Public Trust” on Friday at 2 p.m.
Before you log off
It will always be Monday to me.
