Senate hearing - live: Zuckerberg defends keeping Bannon on Facebook after saying Fauci should be beheaded
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Your support makes all the difference.Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, are appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend their companies’ approaches to moderate speech on their platforms.
They will face questions about how they handled posts relating to the election and the labelling of misinformation.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the hearing in late October after both Twitter and Facebook limited the exposure of a New York Post article relating to allegations against Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee and now president-elect Joe Biden.
In his opening remarks, Senator Graham asked: "What I want to try to find out is if you're not a newspaper at Twitter or Facebook, then why do you have editorial control over the New York Post?"
He said he did not think articles on Hunter Biden, refuted by the Biden campaign, needed to be flagged or excluded from distribution.
Watch live: Facebook and Twitter Big Tech Senate hearing
Senator Diane Feinstein is questioning Jack Dorsey about the labelling of tweets - specifically a label on Donald Trump’s tweet claiming that 2.7 million votes for him were deleted.
Mr Dorsey says that labels on tweets lead to more information regarding the veracity of those claims.
Here’s an example of the information:
DHS committees say there is no evidence that any voting systems deleted, lost or changed votes in the US elections
A consortium of national and state election security officials within the US Department of Homeland Security said that there is "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." The statement refutes President Trump’s ongoing and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud and irregularities from the results of the 2020 elections.
Senator Lindsey Graham asked both of the CEOs if they have seen the movie The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which explores the rise of social media and the purported damage it has caused to society through addictive design, use in politics, spread of conspiracy theories, and mental health issues it has caused.
Mr Zuckerberg said he was aware of it, Mr Dorsey said he had not seen it.
What was anticipated to be a highly contentious hearing quickly became so, when Mr Zuckerberg was asked if he would commit to taking down Steve Bannon’s Facebook account after he called for the beheading of US officials including Dr Anthony Fauci.
“The content in question did violate our policies, and we took it down,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
"Having your content taken down does not mean your account is suspended."
Asked if he would commit to taking down Mr Bannon's account, he said: "No. That is not what our policy would do now."
In October, Republican politicians on the Senate judiciary committee voted unanimously to approve formal summons for Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Dorsey. Democrats on the panel did not vote on the subpoena.
The subpoenas were approved right after the social media platforms decided to block stories from the New York Post that made claims about the son of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
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