The House Energy and Commerce Committee has called a new hearing on platform misinformation to include testimony from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Scheduled for March 25th, the hearing will be a joint effort from the Communications and Technology subcommittee and the Consumer Protection and Commerce subcommittee.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are all scheduled to testify.
“This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation,” the chairs of the committees said in a joint statement. “For far too long, big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they’ve played in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences. Industry self-regulation has failed. We must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”
Dorsey and Zuckerberg were previously called before Congress in November, for the Senate Judiciary’s impromptu hearing on moderation and misinformation labeling. However, this will be the first hearing they have attended since the January 6th attack on the US Capitol and the various deplatforming efforts that followed. All three companies have since removed former President Donald Trump from their platforms (in Google’s case, through YouTube), actions that remain deeply controversial among Republicans.