A panel of officials from leading Silicon Valley digital technology giants testified Tuesday in response to congressional concerns that they are using their immense social media power to censor conservative content with which they disagree politically.
“We thrive to protect expression including views that some of our users might find objectionable,” Nick Pickles, Twitter’s senior strategist for public policy, told the House Judiciary Committee. “Threats of violence, abuse of content, and harassment are an attack on free expression intended to silence the voice of others, and therefore robbing Twitter of valuable perspectives, and threatening the free expression we seek to foster. Accordingly, the Twitter rules prohibit this and other types of behavior.”
Pickles said Twitter does not believe censorship will solve societal problems, nor that removing content will solve disagreements. He admitted that mistakes are sometimes made, but the company’s goal is to not filter out content based on ideology.
Other members of the panel expressed similar views on their policies.
“We are dedicated to access to information and freedom of expression,” said Juniper Downs, YouTube’s global head of public policy. “But it’s not everything goes on YouTube. We developed robust community guidelines, which we publish, to provide clear guidance on the rules of the road. For example, we don’t allow pornography, incitement of violence or harassment.”
The judiciary panel hearing was convened, according to chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) because the Silicon Valley leaders “have dominated their markets, and perhaps rightfully so, given the quality of their products. However, this begs another question: Are these companies using their market power to push the envelope on filtering decisions that favor the contexts they prefer?”
Members of the expert panel claimed their respective companies thrive to uphold free speech. But they noted that there are exceptions for content that violates the law or internal guidelines against such practices as promoting violence or child pornography.
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Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) then pressed the panel on how, for example, the algorithm Facebook uses to filter out content works. Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, told King it depends on numerous factors, including the kinds of information a user prefers.
“It looks at things like what is the type of content an individual tends to look at, what’s the context of a certain piece of content, what type of engagement is the content generating,” Bickert said. “There is no point in where an individual Facebook employee decides where an individual piece of content will go in someone else’s news feed.”
King also expressed concern over the type of organizations that help companies like Facebook draft their content policies. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was brought up because critics have repeatedly claimed the group’s assessments are driven by extreme left-wing partisanship. Bickert admitted Facebook uses SPLC but claimed it was only one of many organizations consulted.
“We do talk with over a hundred organizations in the course of creating our content policies,” Bickert said. “That includes organizations from around the world. No organization has decision-making power over our content policies.”
Facebook also has a system of spotting what it may judge to be “fake news.” But content deemed as fake is not removed unless it violates internal rules against something like violence or porn. That content is reviewed by a group of fact-checkers, and if all of them agree it’s fake, it is downgraded so it’s less likely to appear in random news feeds.
The content that is deemed fake news is also paired with links to related articles considered trustworthy. The Weekly Standard, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes.com are the current fact-checkers. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pushed the issue by asking how that process works.
“We do work with third-party fact-checkers, all of them are approved, their points are approved, and they are signatories to the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles,” Bickert. “The way the process works, if something is flagged as potentially false it is sent to all five, or all participating fact-checkers. I believe there are five.”
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