The wealthy, powerful titans of Big Tech were on the hot seat in the U.S. Senate this week, which numbered Round 6 in the ongoing feud over social media censoring Republicans and conservatives.
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A media watchdog says it is worrisome but enlightening to witness prominent Democrats reveal themselves as authoritarian figures after they warned about Donald Trump for four years.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat through his sixth congressional hearing on Tuesday, this one in the Senate Judiciary Committee where Republicans accused him and Twitter head Jack Dorsey of censoring conservatives.
“While we strive to do as well as possible and be as precise as possible,” Zuckerburg said, “we will make some mistakes.”
“Thank you, I appreciate your acknowledgement of the fact that there are mistakes,” responded Sen. Mike Lee. “As I've noted previously, those mistakes sure happen a whole lot more on one side of the political spectrum than the other.”
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats pushed for Big Tech to explain why conservatives weren’t being punished more often for their content. In one exchange, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pressed Dorsey over the “warning” labels Twitter is including in President Trump’s tweets claiming election fraud.
“Does that label do enough,” Feinstein asked, “to prevent the tweet's harms when the tweet is still visible and is not accurate?”
Feinstein even complained that Facebook had belatedly removed a political group called “Stop the Steal” from its social media site, The New York Post reported.
“You shut the group down,” she complained, “but substantial damage had already been done.”
The push for censorship came from other senators, too, the Post reported, such as Sen. Chris Coons urging Twitter to clamp down on “climate denialism.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono complained to Zuckerburg that Facebook allows conservative news outlets such as The Daily Caller and Breitbart to participate as third-party fact checkers. Liberal news outlets are presumably part of that same fact-checking group but the far-left senator complained about the presence of right-wing media.
“Mr. Zuckerberg, I’m really wondering at what point you will stop giving in to baseless claims of anti-conservative bias,” she lectured,“and start exercising your control over Facebook to stop driving division,” she said.
After viewing the hearing, Dan Gainor of MRC TechWatch says neither political party got much of what they want.
“The whole hearing was based on how they censored conservative media,” he tells OneNewsNow, “and neither Zuckerberg nor Dorsey was willing to admit that they censor conservative media.”
A media watchdog says it is worrisome but enlightening to witness prominent Democrats reveal themselves as authoritarian figures after they warned about Donald Trump for four years.
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News stories each weekday from reporters you can trust without the liberal bias found in much of "mainstream" media.