YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki should have been at Tuesday's Senate hearing alongside Dorsey and Zuckerberg, given YouTube is also a major vector for disinformation
a major vector for disinfo — avoiding scrutiny by being opaque & keeping quiet. https://www.wired.com/... Taylor Hatmaker / @tayhatmaker : i mentioned this in my pre-hearing post too and i'm also very curious... how does Susan Wojcicki totally escape scrutiny on this stuff? https://www.wired.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Congress should do what they did when Google and parent Alphabet's CEOs avoided testimony, invite for a solo appearance. https://twitter.com/... Rick Webb / @rickwebb : It's insanity that YouTube keeps getting a free pass in these hearings. https://twitter.com/... @cbsnews : Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says the company labeled more than 300,000 misleading election tweets between October 27 and November 11, representing about 0.2% of all election-related tweets. That includes tweets by President Trump https://www.cbsnews.com/... https://twitter.com/... @wired : Opinion: YouTube's general public relations and governance policy over the years has been to be more opaque, keep its head down, keep quiet, and let the other platforms take the heat. It's generally gotten away with it https://www.wired.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : Zuckerberg's persistent attachment to neutrality as a goal leads inevitably to “both sides” thinking, and precludes even a conversation about what Facebook actually values and how it could achieve that. In the absence of any values, what you have is an amoral profit machine. David Gilbert / @daithaigilbert : Zuckerberg talks about Myanmar, and as usual lists the things his company has done in the wake of the Rohingya genocide in which Facebook was complicit But the thing it, in the wake of Myanmar's recent election, hate speech is still flourishing on FB. https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/ ... Rat King / @mikeisaac : Hawley is enjoying grilling Zuckerberg directly! Rat King / @mikeisaac : Sen. Hawley is up, and presents materials to Zuckerberg given to Hawley by a “facebook whistleblower” that came to his office. Says an internal platform called “Tasks” is used by “Censorship teams” internally. Zuckerberg disagrees with the characterization of the tools. @ceciliakang : Zuckerberg, when asked about Addiction to FB: he says studies are inconclusive and that the vast majority of people don't believe it to be addictive. Dorsey, same question, moves a little closer to a real answer. Says (social media) can be addictive.
WiredEvelyn Douek
Context & Ripple Effects
The Tuesday session was the latest in a string of appearances where Congress questions the same two CEOs: Dorsey and Zuckerberg testified again this week — including on whether platforms are addictive, where their answers split (Dorsey said they can be, Zuckerberg called the research inconclusive) — while Susan Wojcicki has never been summoned alongside them. The same asymmetry held at the 2018 foreign-influence hearing, which heard from Sandberg and Dorsey but no Google-owned platform.
Commentators argue the gap is strategic: Wired's framing is that YouTube is a major disinformation vector that avoids scrutiny through opacity and silence, and Jason Kint points to a ready-made remedy — Congress previously responded when Google and Alphabet executives dodged testimony by inviting them for a solo session.
First-order effects
Public pressure now falls on Congress, not just on YouTube: critics are explicitly calling for a solo Wojcicki invitation modeled on how lawmakers handled past Google and Alphabet no-shows.
YouTube's silence leaves its disinformation record — including the criticism tied to Myanmar and the Rohingya raised around the company — unexamined in the very sessions shaping platform policy.
Second-order effects
If legislators follow the Kint playbook, Alphabet faces the prospect of a standalone hearing where YouTube's recommendations and moderation choices can't be diluted by sharing the stage with Facebook and Twitter.
A sustained pattern of selective summoning risks building accountability rules from testimony that covers only half the ecosystem, leaving video-platform distribution — arguably the largest recommendation-driven surface — structurally under-regulated relative to social feeds.
The trend: Congressional oversight of platforms is consolidating into a two-CEO routine that systematically excludes Google-owned YouTube, and pressure for a solo Wojcicki hearing is testing whether that exclusion holds.
This hearing feels different. Maybe the senators are less-prepared, but I can't help but see it as a post-election shift. GOP threatened all kinds of legislative and regulatory action on bias throughout the election. Now that Biden won, they want to talk about self-regulation.
Asked about its Silicon Valley-based employees' generally leftward political leanings, Zuckerberg says it means “we need to be careful and intentional internally to make sure that bias doesn't seep into decisions that we make.”
Zuckerberg splitting hairs by saying FB doesn't “overturn fact-checks.” It removed fact-check strikes from pages/accounts to prevent them frm being punished. This happened repeatedly w/out knowledge of checkers. It undercuts their work & has no disclosure: https://www.buzzfeednew…
Per @nytimes, 53 of the 72 questions Republicans asked today of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey wee about content moderation. 37 were specifically about the supposed censoring of conservatives & ideological makeup of their employees. https://www.nytimes.com/...
important piece by @evelyndouek on @YouTube — a major vector for disinfo — avoiding scrutiny by being opaque & keeping quiet. https://www.wired.com/...
i mentioned this in my pre-hearing post too and i'm also very curious... how does Susan Wojcicki totally escape scrutiny on this stuff? https://www.wired.com/...
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says the company labeled more than 300,000 misleading election tweets between October 27 and November 11, representing about 0.2% of all election-related tweets. That includes tweets by President Trump https://www.cbsnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Opinion: YouTube's general public relations and governance policy over the years has been to be more opaque, keep its head down, keep quiet, and let the other platforms take the heat. It's generally gotten away with it https://www.wired.com/...
Zuckerberg's persistent attachment to neutrality as a goal leads inevitably to “both sides” thinking, and precludes even a conversation about what Facebook actually values and how it could achieve that. In the absence of any values, what you have is an amoral profit machine.
Zuckerberg talks about Myanmar, and as usual lists the things his company has done in the wake of the Rohingya genocide in which Facebook was complicit But the thing it, in the wake of Myanmar's recent election, hate speech is still flourishing on FB. https://www.frontiermyanmar.…
Sen. Hawley is up, and presents materials to Zuckerberg given to Hawley by a “facebook whistleblower” that came to his office. Says an internal platform called “Tasks” is used by “Censorship teams” internally. Zuckerberg disagrees with the characterization of the tools.
Zuckerberg, when asked about Addiction to FB: he says studies are inconclusive and that the vast majority of people don't believe it to be addictive. Dorsey, same question, moves a little closer to a real answer. Says (social media) can be addictive.
So far @BenSasse has been the best at recognizing this whole hearing is stupid and that content moderation is impossible to do well. But he still gets hung up on “consistency” without realizing that when you're moderating so much content consistency is impossible as well.
And @jack highlights that they do not hire based on ideology. They don't ask employees about their political ideology, but they focus on their content moderation policies, and the outcomes of those policies.
Zuckerberg says Facebook has banned 250 White supremacist organizations from the platform and treats them the same as other terrorist groups https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
But Sen Durbin doesn't ask about this and lets Zuckerberg skate by with his previous explanation. It seems like when a Senator gets to the cusp of asking a meaningful question, they pivot to something else for fear of losing their time.
Now @SenMikeLee is lying, and claiming that while he understands “mistakes” happen in moderation, they only happen on one side of the aisle. This is wrong. It just reveals that Lee lives in a bubble where he doesn't hear about the mistakes on the other side.
So now we have @SenMikeLee ridiculously claiming that Twitter/FB moderation practices violate FTC regulations because they claim “neutrality” (they don't) & they moderate unfairly based on ideology (they also don't). This is idiotic, Senator.
Zuckerberg asked why Bannon's account was not taken down for advocating for the beheading of government officials. As a counterpoint, he says that terrorist content leads to accounts being banned immediately. I'm confused. Is advocating for political beheadings not terrorism?