Google, Facebook, and Twitter are set to attend a third hearing on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing a spokesman for Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Senator and Chairman of a Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism of the Senate Judiciary Committee. One congressional hearing was already scheduled for Wednesday, November 1st, but was only meant for the companies’ legal representatives, whereas some of their C-Suite officials will attend another hearing in front of Senator Graham’s subcommittee a day earlier. It’s currently unclear which executives from the three firms will appear in Washington on Tuesday and none of the involved parties announced their attendance in an official capacity as of this writing.
While the Russian meddling with the U.S. election system and democratic process will be the main subject of the Tuesday hearing, Senator Graham previously said the issue of social media extremism is another topic he intends to tackle next week in an effort to determine whether proposing new legislation for regulating social media networks is necessary, i.e. whether they’re presently doing enough to remove and report radical content posted through their services or if they should be legally compelled to do so. In regards to the issue of the 2016 elections, the three companies will once again be interrogated about the roles their online platforms played in last year’s controversy and possibly asked to present some findings from their internal investigations into the matter which have been widely reported about in recent months. The entire contents of the hearing will be publicly broadcast, with Facebook, Google, and Twitter all being expected to assure legislators that they’re taking a maximally serious approach to the situation.
The latest development ties back to the fight against fake news that Google and Facebook have been intensively waging for the better part of the last 12 months, with both Silicon Valley giants recently introducing a wide variety of services, tools, policies, and educational materials meant to curb the spread of factually inaccurate, misleading, and outright false information on the World Wide Web. Their efforts are expected to continue in the future and be significantly intensified in the run-up to the next U.S. midterm elections set to take place on November 6th, 2018.