Platforms

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slammed Google as part of his ongoing criticism of the company's alleged bias against conservatives, mentioning its work with China, its search results accidentally showing one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party as “Nazism”, and for work it did to mobilize the Latino vote. “It’s their own executive that they said they have a silent donation where they tried to help people to help Hillary,” he said, referencing a report by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that described an email sent by Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.

Several potential presidential candidates for the 2020 election have expressed an interest in policies that would battle monopolies in the US, including in the tech industry, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute. “Well more than six of the likely presidential candidates this next time around, we’ve had extensive conservations with about these issues,” he said.

Facebook  gave a "false rating" to an article after the Weekly Standard, a conservative publication used by Facebook as a fact checker, claimed the article was incorrect. The article in question, published by ThinkProgress, was titled, "Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v.

Like it or not, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a gatekeeper. The era when Facebook could learn by doing, and fix the mistakes later, is over. The costs are too high, and idealism is not a defense against negligence. In some sense, the “Mark Zuckerberg production”—as he called Facebook in its early years—has only just begun. Zuckerberg is not yet thirty-five, and the ambition with which he built his empire could well be directed toward shoring up his company, his country, and his name.

Democratic attorneys general from key states said they have not yet been invited by the Justice Department to its upcoming review of tech companies, prompting criticism that the Trump administration's inquiry is a politically-charged attack on the tech industry. 

A Department of Justice spokesman said in a statement on Sept 5 that Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to convene a meeting with state attorneys over concerns tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are “hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” The Trump Administration is unlikely to prove specific charges, but that’s not the point, said Alex Abdo, a senior staff attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute.

Washington officials once dazzled by the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are now openly questioning the freedom they’ve bestowed on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Emboldened by a president who’s openly contemptuous of the companies -- despite his own reliance on Twitter -- and intelligence reports linking popular online sites to election interference, lawmakers from both parties grilled top tech executives this week about whether, and how, Washington should rein them in. 

Rebuilding Facebook’s content enforcement mechanisms to weed out harmful content could take 3 years or longer, said the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The good news is we started this in 2017, so even though this work will extend through 2019, I do expect us to end this year on a significantly better trajectory than when we entered it,” he added. Zuckerberg said that he would reveal more about the company’s plans to fight abuse in the near future in a series of posts.

In one particularly revealing line of questioning during the Sept 5 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook makes money and whether the company’s hate-speech policies are truly aimed to protect vulnerable communities that are often the subject of prejudice and animus. Her point was that there’s a real question as to whether Facebook, a company whose first responsibility is to its shareholders, is adequately poised to address false news, hate speech, or any other harmful—and highly engaging—content that users generate.

On September 5, 2018, lawmakers on Capitol Hill hosted two hearings with the heads of Facebook and Twitter. In the morning, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms.