The Senate Commerce Committee is prepared to grill three of Big Tech's most familiar faces on Wednesday. The hearing, entitled, "Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?," will focus on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is still a useful tool. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet will all try and answer the question.
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The hearing will examine whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has outlived its usefulness in today’s digital age. It will also examine legislative proposals to modernize the decades-old law, increase transparency and accountability among big technology companies for their content moderation practices, and explore the impact of large ad-tech platforms on local journalism and consumer privacy. The hearing will provide an opportunity to discuss the unintended consequences of Section 230’s liability shield and how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse.
The conservatives on the committee will have something else on their mind. Expect them to put these social media giants in the hot seat after Facebook and Twitter decided to suppress the reach of a recent New York Post report about Hunter Biden's shady overseas business dealings and how it pertained to his father, current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The social media platforms didn't have evidence to prove it was untrue. They just preemptively silenced the story.
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After that fiasco, the Senate Judiciary Committee also sent the CEOs a few subpoenas.
"Twitter and Facebook and big tech billionaires don't get to censor political speech and actively interfere in the election," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said. "That's what they're doing right now."
You can watch today's virtual Commerce Committee hearing below. The CEOs will sit before the Judiciary on November 17.
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