A day after Twitter Inc. endured a public drubbing from a whistleblower about lax data-privacy standards, social media took another one on the chin in a congressional hearing Wednesday.
“Sensational, provocative content sells ads” on your platform, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, said in one particularly sharp exchange with Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer. Far-right conspiracy group QAnon, for instance, spread its views on Meta largely unfettered for several years since 2017 to the point where 16% of Americans now believe in its “insidious theory,” Peters added.
In another, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., pressed Meta, YouTube and Twitter on whether they “throttled back” what he deemed incendiary content during widespread protests in the summer of 2020. Each company said they applied the same standards to content regardless of their political stripe. The tense exchanges between senators and four tech executives — Cox; Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube; Vanessa Pappas, chief operating officer at TikTok; and Jay Sullivan, general manager of Twitter’s Bluebird consumer service — highlight rising tensions as the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission pursue antitrust actions against Big Tech while tech legislation wallows in the House and Senate.
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