And, we end the hearing with a lengthy diatribe from Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. She is angry Facebook takes advertising money from Chinese companies like Huawei and Alibaba.

She complains about “cancel culture” and asks why her own post about voter fraud was slapped with an election misinformation label.

Zuckerberg concedes that it is bad to ban people based on political affiliation but does not say much else. She again calls for the removal of Section 230 “shield”, seemingly not realizing this would lead to more censorship of misinformation and the removal of posts like hers that contain falsehoods.

Senator Cory Booker spent a lot of his questioning reiterating that Donald Trump lost the presidential election, in case his Republican colleagues did not know.

He specifically addresses algorithmic amplification, and the danger of platforms sending users to progressively more extreme pages. He asks how platforms will handle the current transitional period until Trump leaves office and the runoff elections in Georgia. Booker, like other senators, brings up the StoptheSteal group and how long it took to be taken down.

Zuckerberg says many of the features changed or turned off for the November elections will remain that way into 2021, and that Facebook is monitoring hashtags, groups and evolving threats.

Respectfully, Senator Mazie Hirono may be the only senator who has asked useful questions today. The Hawaii Democrat requested Zuckerberg elaborate on the effectiveness of flagging misinformation on the platform.

She cited a Harvard study that found Donald Trump’s tweets as one of the biggest sources of voting misinformation in the US and questioned whether more should be done.

Zuckerberg said the labels “point to a broader conversation so people can see what’s happening with the election results”.

“We don’t want to put ourselves in a position of calling an election,” Zuckerberg said. “That is not our job.”

Dorsey said for Twitter’s part, the platform maintains exceptions to its rules for politicians “under the principle that people should be able to hear what their elected officials are saying”.

He reiterates that there are some hard lines, for example, hate speech or violence, that will be censored no matter who is tweeting them.

Hirono concludes by citing more than five studies that showed there is no political bias against conservatives on these social media platforms.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa is asking Dorsey and Zuckerberg how they plan to ensure their employee base is representative of Facebook’s user base, after Zuckerberg said he believes full-time Facebook employees lean left-of-center.

Zuckerberg notes that, of course, you can’t ask someone their political views during a job interview so it would be difficult to systematically ensure a complete equity of Democratic vs. Republican employees. He does note that because Covid has allowed Facebook employees to work from anywhere, it is likely its workforce will be based from a larger variety of locations and maybe have a wider variety of views.

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat of Connecticut, asks Zuckerberg why the platform did not enforce anti-hate policies like its call to arms policy that would have prevented the violent event in Kenosha, Wisconsin earlier this year.

Zuckerberg again blamed the Kenosha violence on the fact that Facebook’s new militia policies had not been fully rolled out yet. Perhaps worth noting militia organizing on Facebook is not new, and that the policy had not been rolled out quickly enough may not be a compelling excuse to people affected by the violence.

Coons and 14 other Democratic senators sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Monday condemning hate content on the platform, particularly content targeted at Muslims. The letter was also signed by Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren.

A weird tangent in today’s hearings started with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who claims a “whistleblower” told him about an internal tool called “Tasks” where employees congregate to decide who they will censor.

This line of questioning continued with multiple senators. However, it appears that Tasks is just a project management platform similar to Trello or Monday. Zuckerberg said he was “surprised” to be asked about an internal tool like this.

Jack Dorsey is asked about bots on the platform and whether they should be banned outright. Dorsey says no and points out there are useful bots, says bots should be labeled.

Twitter has said in a number of reports it has taken action against bots, particularly those meant to spread disinformation. However, many bots are not meant for disinformation and are useful.

Some examples: The bot that automatically tweets the most recent legislation introduced to Congress, the @CongressEdits bot that automatically tweets when changes are made to Wikipedia pages from computers using US Capitol IP addresses, the bot that automatically tweets random lyrics from Taylor Swift’s album Folklore every 30 minutes (maybe just useful to me?)

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska is up next. His questioning focuses largely on the political leanings of Facebook and Twitter employees and of the CEOs themselves.

Zuckerberg acknowledges there are likely political leanings between the average Facebook user and its employees, who may lean left.

“I do think it’s undisputed that our employee base, at least the full time folks politically would be somewhat or maybe more than just a little somewhat to the left of where our overall community is,” he said.

Still, he notes, Facebook has 35,000 moderators around the US and not just in Silicon Valley. It would be naive to assume all of these people are considered left-of-center or otherwise against Republicans.

Sasse, a Republican, also seems to acknowledge this hearing and its supposed purpose is a bit silly.

“I especially think it’s odd that so many in my party are zealous to do this right now when you would have an incoming administration of the other party that would be writing the rules and regulations about it,” he said.

Now Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois is speaking. He’s got some strong words for his Republican colleagues who called for the hearing today, saying there are probably more important issues that could be addressed at this point in time.

We live in a dangerous world: there are issues of national security, the worst pandemic public health crisis in modern times in America, and we’re being challenged as to whether there is going to be a peaceful transition of power in America’s presidency. At that moment in time, we decided none of those topics were important, and that what was important was to determine whether or not, social media was discriminating against Republicans. - Dick Durbin

Durbin asks specifically about why Facebook did not remove a Facebook event that led to a deadly shooting in Kenosha, despite hundreds of reports. Zuckerberg blames this on an “operational mistake” as Facebook’s anti-militia policy was new and some moderators “had not yet been trained on that.”

We are back from a short recess. Seantor Patrick Leahy of Vermont is getting his chance to question. He complains about election misinformation and asks if either Facebook or Twitter has done an in-depth post mortem review of the reach of misinformation during the 2020 elections.

Zuckerberg said Facebook is commissioning independent academics to do research. Dorsey said Twitter is doing the same, including opening its API to researchers.

We are taking a quick recess before more questioning. I will leave this tweet here if you need a summary of this morning’s proceedings in the meantime.

Republican Senator Mike Lee does a lot of disingenuous, nonsensical questioning of Zuckerberg and Dorsey, seems to imply bias against conservatives, and says the only violence he has ever heard of on Facebook was carried out by “antifa”.

Obviously this is not accurate, there have been multiple violent acts organized on Facebook by right wing individuals just this year including the murder of protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the planned kidnapping of Michigan governor, which was orchestrated through a Facebook group.

California Senator Dianne Feinstein launches into her questioning of Zuckerberg and Dorsey. She seems to be not completely familiar with what Facebook and Twitter were doing around misinformation during the elections.

She asks if Facebook did enough to counteract Trump’s electoral misinformation. Zuckerberg briefly mentions context labels added to Trump’s post. Feinstein complains Facebook did not remove a “stop the steal” group fast enough.

Feistein asks Jack why Twitter will not take down Trump’s tweets. Jack tries to explain it is a first amendment issue but Feinstein seems unsatisfied with the responses.

Next up John Cornyn asks about moderation choices, in particular why Facebook takes down some content and not others.

Zuckerberg is asked why Steve Bannon’s account was not taken down after advocating for the killing of Dr. Fauci and other officials in a Facebook live video. Zuckerberg said terrorist content and child exploitative actions result in immediate account takedowns, but calling for the murder of a public figure -- which apparently is not in and of itself a terrorist act, according to Facebook -- counts as just one strike towards an eventual takedown.

Senator Blumenthal now questions the execs, he has some strong words about the monopoly power of social media. He says Facebook should be broken up, and Instagram should be sold.

He claims the companies are both “backsliding,” or failing to take action against dangerous disinformation. Many experts have said Twitter and Facebook in fact improved this election cycle in their ability to find and label misinformation quickly.

Graham corners Jack Dorsey into saying he does indeed support changes to Section 230. Dorsey had not previously expressed his or Twitter’s stance on reform of the law.

Facebook has repeatedly expressed that it supports changes to Section 230, but many critics of the company suggest this support of reform is disingenuous. Facebook stands to benefit from changes, as it is large enough to weather reform to the law while its smaller competitors would suffer.

Senator Graham starts out the questioning, highlighting public health concerns around social media and its addictive nature. Zuckerberg claims Facebook is not “designed” to be addictive. Zuckerberg said “we certainly do not want our products to be addictive - we want people to use them because they’re meaningful”.

Of course, research does show Facebook (and other social media) has addictive qualities. Graham ends by asking both Dorsey and Zuckerberg if they have seen the buzzy new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (they both say no) and suggests they watch it.

Now Facebook exec Mark Zuckerberg is making his opening statements.

He listed a number of measures Facebook took around the election to stop the spread of misinformation and promote voter participation. Facebook put labels on misinformation from Donald Trump and others and debuted partnerships with news wires to put accurate information at the top of all pages.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is now making his opening statements.

He gets straight to the point, addressing the New York Post story that led to this hearing. Twitter restricted the circulation of a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

Dorsey said the measures were taken due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which were allegedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibited “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”. Twitter later changed its enforcement policies following backlash to these choices.

“I hope this illustrates the rationale behind our actions demonstrates our ability to take feedback,” Dorsey said. “Mistakes and changes were all transparent to the public.”

Graham’s testifying on Tuesday comes as he faces a large scandal outside of the tech world, being accused of having suggested Georgia throw out valid mail-in ballots.

Anyway, he is now saying social media firms have a moral imperative to stop moderating content. He says he does not think the government should have to take over the job “of telling America what tweets are legitimate and what are not”. Of course, revoking Section 230 protections would lead the government to do just that.

“I don’t want the government deciding what content to take up and put down,” he said. “But when you have companies that have the power of governments have far more power than traditional media outlets, some thing has to give.”

And we’re off: Lindsey Graham is talking about all the ways social media is ruining our youth. Teens check their phones 187 times daily! Snapchat streaks are addictive!

He says because of this, Section 230 protections should be revoked. Section 230 is a law that shields social media firms from legal liability for what users post. He says it should be modified to “incentivize social media platforms to come up with standards that are transparent”.