Tech hearing: If Zuckerberg repeats himself, don’t be surprised

Don’t be surprised if Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, starts to sound repetitive at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on censorship and social media. He has done this before.

Five times, in fact. This will be Zuckerberg’s sixth appearance in front of Congress, and the 36-year-old is now well accustomed to making a pitch about how his social network — the world’s largest — is a force for good. Forget that Facebook is a veritable superspreader of disinformation and confusion across the internet.

Facebook said Zuckerberg planned to remind lawmakers at the hearing that his platform gives everyone on earth a voice. That included the election this month. In the run-up to Nov. 3, Facebook created the Voting Information Center, a hub of voting data and directions, and directed millions of users to register to vote, among other moves.

As he did in his last virtual visit to Capitol Hill last month, Zuckerberg is also likely to say that some of the laws governing platforms like his own need updating and revisiting. They include Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields companies like Facebook from liability for the speech hosted on their platforms.

Zuckerberg is also likely to call again for new regulations on privacy, elections and data portability, Facebook said. He previously asked for guidance in those areas from the federal government.

Lawmakers are likely to focus their questions — again — on whether Facebook censors some of their views. Republican lawmakers, in particular, have asserted that the company has an anti-conservative bias.

Yet whatever drubbing Zuckerberg takes, it will probably be less severe than the one that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, is given when he, too appears before the committee Tuesday. That’s because Zuckerberg has managed to make his social network seem less intrusive than Twitter at blocking and labelling content.

Last month, for instance, Twitter prohibited the sharing of a New York Post article that made unsubstantiated corruption claims about Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden. Facebook did not go as far and made the link to the article less visible in the feeds of users while the article was fact-checked by third-party experts.

Even so, Facebook has cracked down on election-related falsehoods with vigor during and after the election. It shut down Facebook groups that promoted the “Stop the Steal” movement, which is built around the false idea that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump. Facebook also added more “friction” to slow the flow of misinformation on its network by creating more steps for reading and sharing posts.

The moves have incited a backlash from conservatives, with millions of people threatening to leave Facebook for apps such as Parler, MeWe and Rumble. Those apps have marketed themselves to conservatives and positioned themselves as free-speech sites. They have seen record numbers of new users over the past week, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.