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With two months to go until Election Day, social media executives were back on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to testify about propaganda and voter manipulation on their platforms. Politicians grilled Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to learn more about what the companies are doing about foreign election meddling, alleged political bias, and their principles in general—like whether Facebook’s absence from China is due to human-rights concerns or not. A morning hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee featured both executives (and an empty chair for Google) while an afternoon hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee starred only Dorsey. This was the first time that either Dorsey or Sandberg sat for public testimony in front of Congress, and the ways the executives handled a number of the tougher questions from elected officials revealed a lot about how their companies are coming to terms with their role in and responsibility to the public discourse—particularly when it comes to the thorny issue of hate speech.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2CnHVs1