There's still a Twitter grilling in the House to come, though.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey faced questions at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
Facebook, Twitter and Google have been the US president's punching bags for accusations of bias lately, but partisan censorship barely got a mention at a Senate hearing Wednesday.
The hearing comes as Silicon Valley faces a reckoning over its scale and influence. Lawmakers and the public have scrutinized the tech industry over its inability to prevent abuse on its platforms, its broad data collection practices, and perceived political bias of its algorithms. Tech companies have long been accused of letting liberal leanings filter into their products, resulting in alleged censorship and suppression.
Only one senator mentioned the possibility of political censorship on the tech giants' platforms.
"I'm a little uncomfortable with where the line is, between taking down misleading and fake information and taking down what someone else may consider legitimate information in the marketplace of ideas," said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats. "I'd hate to see your platforms become political in the sense that you're censoring one side or the other of any given debate."
It's been a favorite charge leveled against tech by political figures, especially lately. President Donald Trump spent much of last week accusing Google, Facebook and Twitter of political bias. And the high-profile banning last month of Alex Jones, the far-right commentator known for pushing conspiracy theories, by many of technology's most powerful companies threw fuel on this long-simmering grievance that tech companies are biased against conservative points of view.
(Jones's Twitter ban, for one, was temporary: He was streaming live on Twitter from Capitol Hill on Wednesday during the hearings.)
Wednesday's Senate hearing was focused on foreign influence on social networks, but a second hearing later Wednesday will address transparency and accountability on Twitter specifically, opening the door for more discussion of perceived bias.
Last week, Trump tweeted that Google's search results are "RIGGED," saying the company is "suppressing voices of Conservatives."
"I think Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people," he told reporters later that day. "Google and Twitter and Facebook, they're really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful."
Then last Tuesday, he tweeted a video claiming Google promoted former President Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses every January -- but not his. Trump added the hashtag #StopTheBias. Google denied the accusation, saying the search engine's homepage did indeed promote Trump's address in January. (A screenshot from the Internet Archive, which keeps a record of what appeared on web domains at any given time, also backs up Google's assertion.) Google said it didn't promote either Trump's or Obama's addresses during their first years in office because those speeches aren't technically considered State of the Union address.
But the accusations of bias against conservatives began long before that. Ahead of the 2016 election, Facebook was accused of suppressing headlines from conservative outlets with its "Trending" news feature. As a result, Facebook retooled the feature several times and eventually ended up shuttering it in June. And when Zuckerberg testified before congress in April, several Republican lawmakers asked him about the social network's decision to remove content from Diamond and Silk, two pro-Trump commentators with 1.7 million followers on Facebook.
No one has tested the content, speech and harassment guidelines of the big tech platforms like Jones. Initially, the tech giants resisted removing his content. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said he doesn't feel comfortable with his company being the "arbiters of truth." He sparked more outrage while defending Jones last month by comparing his content to that of Holocaust deniers. He said that while he disagreed with those kinds of posts, they should be allowed to remain on Facebook because some Holocaust deniers weren't aware they were spreading disinformation.
Dorsey appeared on conservative commentator Sean Hannity's radio show last month to argue that InfoWars hadn't violated Twitter's rules. "We'll enforce if he does," Dorsey said at the time. "And we'll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren't artificially amplified."
Eventually, several Silicon Valley giants -- Facebook, Google's YouTube, Apple, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Vimeo and Spotify -- banned Infowars from their platforms. Twitter suspended Jones for a week last month by putting his account in a read-only mode, meaning he could see the tweets of other, but not tweet, retweet or like posts. The tech giants said that they don't tolerate hate speech and that Infowars violated their community standards and guidelines.
Wednesday's hearing are only the latest that the tech giants have faced since the 2016 election. The first was last November, when the top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter and Google were called to testify before the Senate and the House over election interference by the Russians. Last April, Zuckerberg himself was called before Congress in the wake of the social network's Cambridge Analytica data scandal. And in July, the heads of public policy for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter testified over the filtering practices of social networks.