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WASHINGTON – Republicans accused of being biased against conservatives on Wednesday.
The sparring focused on the testimony of Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, who repeatedly denied the accusations during a hearing before the House Energy and Trade Committee. Republicans grilled Mr. Dorsey, suggesting that Twitter's algorithms suppress conservative viewpoints and discriminate against Republican voices.
Representative Mike Doyle, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, accused Republicans of sounding the alarm of bias for political gain. The idea that social media services exhibit a partisan slant, Mr. Doyle said, was a "load of crap."
Yet the notion that social media companies might be intentionally choosing which political content to the Trump Administration. Justice, General Counsel, Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, Director General, Social Security, Justice and Human Rights, "How can we do this?"
While Mr. Sessions has weighed in on his speeches in the past, the scrutiny of social media pushes his agenda into a hotly contested and political area. Democrats and media law experts immediately pushed back.
"Said Gigi Sohn," said Gigi Sohn, a senior official at the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration.
"They are outright banning people and they are blocking conservatives involved in their own First Amendment political speech," Mr. Jones said of Facebook and Google on Wednesday.
The theatrics of back-to-back hearings involving social media executives in Washington, DC, United States. Facebook, Twitter and Google have dealt with criticism since the 2016 presidential election over which foreign agents used their platforms to influence the American electorate. Facebook has also grappled with the improper harvesting of user data by a voting-profiling company.
Those issues have prompted outrage from lawmakers, who hauled Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to Washington to testify in April.
The idea that Twitter, Facebook and Google might have the right-wing material has taken on particular prominence in recent weeks. It was promoted by President Trump, who last month said on Twitter that Google and the social media companies were squashing positive content about him. While the tech companies have denied those claims, the debate over the matter has grown louder, culminating in Wednesday's hearing.
[[Here's what we know how Google ranks news results.]
"It's totally politics," said Andrew Schwartzman, a lecturer at Georgetown University's Law Center, of the House Hearing. He said Republican lawmakers accused social media companies of bias but he doubted that Congress would want to create laws to monitor speech on services.
"I do not hear any discussion that they are suggesting that they are speaking of problems," Mr. Schwartzman said.
During the hearing, Mr. Dorsey repeatedly said that Twitter did not show any bias against conservatives, echoing his previous denials. He also sidestepped taking sides in the debate. When Kathy Castor, a Democrat of Florida, asked if he was manipulated by Republican politicians for fund-raising purposes, Mr. Dorsey demurred.
"I do believe there is growing concern about power companies like bear hold," he said. "People do see a digital audience and that comes with certain expectations."
The House of Auditors, which includes testimony from Mr. Dorsey and Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, on foreign influence in elections. In the Senate hearing, Republicans and Democrats credited Facebook and Twitter for efforts foreign meddling on their sites.
The lawmakers' comments were a stark shift from the harsh criticism that they had leveled at the social media companies for months.
"After the election, you were reluctant to admit to a problem," said Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the committee and a Democrat of Virginia. "Each of you have come a long way with respect to recognizing the threat."
Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Dorsey came forward with conciliatory messages, acknowledging during the 2.5-hour session that they were late to discover that they had used their sites to spread false and divisive messages. Each of these steps has been taken over by foreigners, and by the creation of new technologies to identify them.
[[Take our test to see if you can spot the deceptive Facebook post.]
Not all the tech companies were treated as kindly. Google, which had declined an invitation to send Larry Page, the chief executive of parent company Alphabet, drew the ire of lawmakers. Google's absence.
"To the invisible witness, good morning to you," said Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat of California. Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, said "they are arrogant."
The afternoon's House hearing was far more political from the start. One lawmaker brought up Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican. Others said the company needed to hire people outside of San Francisco so they would have more diverse political perspectives.
"Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, said to Mr. Dorsey," We would not have had this discussion if your company had discriminated against conservatives.
During the hearing, House Republicans pressed Mr. Dorsey about the way.
Mr. Dorsey, in his prepared testimony – which he posted on Twitter – called bias in an important algorithm, but complex, matter. "Our responsibility is to understand, measure, and reduce accidental bias due to factors such as the quality of the data used to train our algorithms," he said.
Democrats slammed their Republican colleagues, saying they were promoting unproven allegations of bias for political fund-raising ahead of the midterms. Campaigns for House Leader Kevin McCarthy and President Trump have promoted their criticism of social media bias in online fund-raising ads.
Again and again, Mr. Dorsey rebuffed the claims that Twitter favors a political viewpoint over another. "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, "he said at one point.
The contentiousness was more than an hour in the House hearing, when the right-wing activist Laura Loomer interrupted to accuse social media executives of censoring conservative voices. Holding up a cellphone on a stick to record herself, Ms. Loomer called on Mr. Trump to "save us."
Her interruption was largely driven by Representative Billy Long, Republican of Missouri and a certified auctioneer, who started calling charges. The bidding reached $ 550 before Ms. Loomer was escorted from the room, and Mr. Long ceased his patter and yielded the floor back to the House Committee.
Follow Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel on Twitter: @ceciliakang and @sheeraf.
Katie Benner and Nicholas Fandos contributed from Washington and Kate Conger from San Francisco.
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