Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday defended his company against charges that it’s trying to muffle conservative points of view, and told a House hearing that his company was trying to be as transparent as possible about its censorship policies.
“How do we earn more trust from the people using our service?” Dorsey said in his opening remarks to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. “We know the way earn more trust around how we make decisions on our platform is to be as transparent as possible.”
Earlier in the day, Dorsey joined Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg before the Senate Intelligence Committee to describe what social media companies are doing ahead of the 2018 midterm elections to protect its users and stop the spread of misinformation. But House lawmakers were more determined to have Dorsey answer questions on censorship of conservative content.
“It takes years to build trust, but only 280 characters to lose it,” said committee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore. “It is critical you are living up to your own promises and expectations you set out for your customers.”
“We wouldn’t be having this discussion if there wasn’t a general agreement that your company had discriminated against conservatives,” added Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.
[Related: Trump warns Google, Facebook, Twitter: ‘Better be careful’ about political bias]
But the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, called his GOP colleagues “hypocrites” for calling out bias when President Trump uses Twitter to send out “juvenile rants” daily.
“President Trump and many Republicans have peddled conspiracy theories about Twitter and other social media platforms to whip up their base and fund-raise,” Pallone said. “I fear the Republicans are using this hearing for those purposes instead of addressing the serious issues raised by social media platforms that affect Americans’ everyday lives.”
Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., said House Majority Kevin McCarthy’s accusations that Twitter “shadow-banned” conservative users was “a load of crap.”
Dorsey denied that the company did so, and said Twitter does not have biased algorithms to determine what tweets appear higher in the timeline.
“Looking at the data, we analyzed tweets sent by all members of the House and Senate, and found no statistically significant difference between the number of times a tweet by a Democrat is viewed versus a Republican, even after our ranking and filtering of tweets has been applied,” Dorsey explained.
Shadow-banning is how Twitter moderates trolls and abusers, by hiding a certain user’s comments from other users involved in a Twitter conversation. The user is not alerted that the comments are hidden.
In July, Trump tweeted that he would look into the “discriminatory and illegal practice.”
“As we have said before, we do not ‘shadowban.’ We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and shipping a change to address this. The profiles, Tweets and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them. To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of Tweets,” a Twitter spokesperson said in response to the tweet.
At the time, Twitter revealed that hundreds of thousands of Republican and Democratic accounts weren’t appearing as automatic suggestions in account searches. Dorsey told lawmakers Wednesday the issue was resolved within 24 hours and that the affected lawmakers gained followers during the affected period.
