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.
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load.
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.
Jones is on the move. "No running," someone says, as he steamrolls his way down the corridor. "He's outside," someone else says.
But as they emerge into the daylight, there's still no sign of Dorsey.
Now Senate security is not letting Jones back in. His frustration is mounting – He's circling the security area, barking about a "bait and switch".
The Twitter live stream is being very flaky. Could someone at Dorsey's company be pulling some strings?
Alex Jones is still live streaming but it doesn't look like he'll get a chance to speak to the Twitter boss.
Remember, we've still got Dorsey's second session to come.
Here's Senator Angus King asking Mr Dorsey about political censorship. This is a big issue lately – both conservatives and liberals have complained that they are being censored for expressing their political views.
We noted before that Google's absence from the hearing did not go unnoticed. Here are Mark Warner's comments on the subject, which are less than glowing.
Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg said today that "hate speech is not allowed on our platform". But as we've reported before, the company's internal guidelines allow for white nationalists to organise on the site.
Jack Dorsey is set to appear shortly before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Chair Greg Walden is starting us out by talking about the difficulty of moderating such a huge platform. He says the committee wants to better understand when and why users are suspended or banned, and what role algorithms have in the process.
Congressman Frank Pallone is praising Twitter for “giving voice to the otherwise voiceless”. But he also says online bullying is a problem, and that users need to be better protected from it.
He also called out Alex Jones by name while talking about disinformation on the platform, saying that more needs to be done to stop false information from spreading.
Oh, and he took shots at Mr Trump for all the insults he's tweeted out over the years. Mr Pauline called it "behaviour that would not be tolerated from a child".
Mr Dorsey has started talking. He's discussing bias in algorithms, and how the company has made missteps in using them before. He says improving these algorithms is an "important step towards ensuring impartiality".
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