Twitter, Facebook chiefs in talks to testify at US House hearing as early as March: Report

The chief executives of Facebook and Twitter are in talks with House of Representatives lawmakers to testify at a hearing as early as March, Politico reported. According to the media outlet, the exact focus of the hearing is not yet clear. But Facebook has discussed making its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, available to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Twitter and its chief, Jack Dorsey, has also discussed the same. 

As per reports, the appearance of Facebook and Twitter CEOs could be contingent on them testifying jointly alongside Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. The media outlet said that a firm date has not yet been set for hearing, but it could come as early as March. It is worth noting that all three chiefs had appeared at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee in October. 

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Twitter, Facebook to make content policy changes 

Republican lawmakers had questioned them about their content moderation decisions while Democrats primarily focused on insufficient actions against misinformation that interfered with the election. Meanwhile, Twitter's misinformation label has become a topic of discussion when the company began adding them to former US President Donald Trump's tweets and in some cases even hiding tweets. Earlier, Twitter had said that it has "inadvertently" limited engagements for a brief period on Trump's tweets with "disputed" labels. 

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According to a Bloomberg report, Twitter and Facebook are set to reverse changes to their content policies that were implemented to curb the spread of misinformation on their platforms during the 2020 US Election. For instance, Twitter plans to restore one-click retweets after it registered a decline of 20 per cent in sharing after the change. Earlier, Facebook had changed its algorithm to push more news from sources it considered authentic. 

Trump and his Republican allies have long accused social media companies of bias against conservatives, often making false allegations that social media platforms secretly "shadow ban" prominent Republicans. However, as of now, there's no evidence that the social media giants are biased against conservative news, posts or other material, or that they favour one side of political debate over another, researchers have found. 

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