4 highlights from Senate social media censorship hearing

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Coons wants crackdown on ‘climate change misinformation’

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., questioned Zuckerberg about Facebook’s “call-to-arms” policy and asked both CEOs about the misinformation policies of their respective companies.

Coons urged Facebook to revise its “call-to-arms policy,” alleging that changes to the policy “could have made a difference in a recent tragedy in Kenosha, Wisconsin.”

He praised Zuckerberg for admitting that “Facebook made an operational mistake in not taking down an event page that called for people to bring weapons to a public park in Kenosha.”

He recounted what happened in Kenosha, specifically that “a young man brought his AR-15 from Illinois to Kenosha, ended up with two protesters dead and one injured.”

Coons asked Zuckerberg why he did not reference the call-to-arms policy “when reviewing what went wrong in Kenosha.”

“The call-to-arms policy … does not prohibit anyone from saying … ‘let’s go get our guns and do something,’” Zuckerberg replied. “Some of these are context-specific and just require a higher level of context and expertise in the area to enforce. So, we don’t necessarily have all of the 35,000 reviewers assess every single one of these policies.”

Later, Coons turned to Dorsey, praising Twitter’s policies against “deep fakes or manipulated media, against COVID-19 misinformation, (and) against things that violate civic integrity.” However, he expressed disappointment that Twitter does not have a “standalone climate change misinformation policy,” asking Dorsey to explain why the company has not adopted one.

Dorsey described “misleading information” as a “large problem” that is “hard to define” before highlighting his company’s crackdowns on “manipulated media,” “civic integrity, around the election specifically” and “public health, specifically around COVID.”

“We want to make sure that the resources we have have the greatest impact on where we believe the greatest severity of harm is going to be. Our policies are living documents, they will evolve. We will add to them. But we thought it important that we focus our energies and prioritize the work as much as we could,” he said.

“I cannot think of a greater harm than climate change, which is transforming literally our planet and causing harm to our entire world,” Coons responded.

“I think we’re experiencing significant harm as we speak. I recognize the pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm … but … I urge you to reconsider that because helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world.”