Twitter’s top executive will tell a House panel on Wednesday that the social media platform doesn’t discriminate against political ideologies, once again rebutting a report that the company “shadow banned” conservative users.
“We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially,” Twitter founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in written testimony released prior to his appearance before before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Its members are certain to question him again over accusations that the platform suppressed posts from House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and other Republicans.
“Let me be clear about one important and foundational fact: Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules,” Dorsey said in his prepared testimony.
In July, Twitter discovered that hundreds of thousands of Republican and Democratic accounts weren’t appearing as automatic suggestions in account searches. Dorsey says the issue was resolved within 24 hours and that the affected lawmakers gained followers during the affected period.
He also cites a number of statistics intended to show the robust presence of conservative voices on Twitter. In 2017, for example, there were 59.5 million posts about President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Mark America Great Again,” or MAGA.
Dorsey further argues that Twitter has worked to improve the civility of public discourse on the platform and will continue to make adjustments based on that objective. “We have learned from situations where people have taken advantage of our service and our past inability to address it fast enough,” he wrote.
New technology will also allow Twitter to “be more aggressive in detecting and minimizing the visibility of certain types of abusive and manipulative behaviors on our platform” as mid-term elections approach, the CEO plans to tell the panel.
The prospect of foreign governments using Twitter and other social media to manipulate voters this fall, as U.S. intelligence agencies said happened in 2016, has spurred concerns in both the House and Senate, particularly among Democrats.
Twitter said it has suspended 770 Iranian-linked accounts that violated its user policies as well as 3,843 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that helped to spread disinformation two years ago.
Dorsey is also slated to appear Wednesday in front of the Senate intelligence Committee, alongside Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer.
