4 highlights from Senate social media censorship hearing
Hawley accuses tech giants of being ‘modern-day robber barons’
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., accused Facebook of coordinating with the other social media giants to engage in censorship and confronted the company about its use of technology that monitors users.
Hawley began his questioning by comparing the social media companies to the robber barons, “the heads of the biggest corporations in America” in the late 19th century. The senator said that the robber barons “set rates, set prices, … determined how they would control information flow, they determined how they would get rid of competition.”
Hawley discussed the “Tasks platform,” which “allows Facebook employees to communicate about projects they’re working on together.” He contended that Facebook’s censorship team and “hate speech engineering team” use the platform to “discuss which individuals or hashtags or websites to ban."
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Zuckerberg acknowledged his awareness of the “Tasks platform,” stressing “I’m not sure I’d agree with your characterization, specifically around content moderation, that you gave.”
Following Zuckerberg’s response, Hawley expressed concern that “the platform reflects censorship input from Google and Twitter.”
Hawley contended that this censorship gives the impression that “Facebook’s censorship teams communicate with their counterparts at Twitter and Google and then enter those companies’ suggestions for censorship onto the Tasks platform so that Facebook can follow up with them and effectively coordinate their censorship efforts.”
“Does Facebook coordinate its content moderation policies or efforts in any way with Google or Twitter?” Hawley asked.
Zuckerberg maintained that Facebook does share signals with the other tech companies on “security-related topics” but that such coordination did not bleed over into content moderation.
Following up, Hawley asked Zuckerberg to unequivocally state that Facebook does not “communicate with Twitter or Google about content moderation, about individuals, websites, phrases, (or) hashtags to ban.” The Facebook CEO continued to assert that his company did not coordinate its content moderation policies with the other tech companies.
After unsuccessfully trying to get Zuckerberg to commit to providing a list from the “Tasks platform” of every mention of Google or Twitter, Hawley asked Zuckerberg to describe “the Facebook internal tool called Centra.” For his part, Zuckerberg denied knowledge of the tool.
Hawley proceeded to explain Centra, which he described as “a tool that Facebook uses to track its users, not just on Facebook, but across the entire internet.”
According to Hawley, “Centra tracks different profiles that a user visits, their message recipients, their linked accounts, the pages they visit around the web that have Facebook buttons."
"Centra also uses behavioral data to monitor users’ accounts, even if those accounts are registered under a different name," Hawley said.
After he finished his summary of Centra, Hawley asked Zuckerberg: “How many accounts in the United States have been subject to review and shut down through Centra?”
Zuckerberg responded by reiterating that he was not familiar with that particular tool while acknowledging: “I’m sure that we have tools that help us with … our platform and community integrity work.”
Hawley also asked Zuckerberg if a record was made every time a Facebook employee accesses “a user’s private information, like their private messages or their personally identifiable data.”
“I believe so,” Zuckerberg replied.
When Hawley asked if an employee’s accessing of users’ personal information triggers an audit, Zuckerberg said that “sometimes, it may.” Hawley asked how often such audits occurred and asked Zuckerberg to provide him a list of audits, which Zuckerberg refused to do under oath. But, the executive offered to follow up with Hawley in private.
Hawley closed his questioning by alleging “clear evidence of coordination between Twitter, Google and Facebook” and “evidence of Facebook tracking its own users all across the web." He also slammed Zuckerberg’s refusal to directly answer his questions. He called on Congress to “take action against these modern-day robber barons.”
