Congress is going to have a busy first week after the August recess, with potentially Google, Facebook and Twitter executives in town to testify before the Intelligence committee. The committee already confirmed that Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg would be testifying before the committee on September 5. However, Google’s co-founder Larry Page has been invited to testify, but has not yet responded to Congress’ request.
The reason behind having these three companies coming to Washington DC and testify in front of the intelligence committee is so that Congress can get an idea of what they plan to do for the midterm elections, and keep foreign powers from meddling in the election again. This would be the second time that the Senate Intelligence Committee has called these companies to testify. However, this would be the first time that senior leadership attends. Typically, these companies will send a spokesperson to Washington to testify in front of Congress. When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg showed up in April to testify, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many were shocked he didn’t send a representative like he normally does. Of course, this all comes after Facebook, Twitter and Google all were “attacked” with fake news and misinformation campaigns during the 2016 Presidential Election, and it has continued since then. The three have been working to make news more transparent and make sure that misinformation is stopped in its tracks.
This testimony couldn’t come at a better time, actually. As President Trump has begun going after these three companies, Google in particular. Stating that Google is suppressing “good news” about him, and only promoting the bad news from the likes of NBC, CBS and others. While Google denied that this is the case (naturally), it does raise some questions about how search results are shown, and also how news articles appear in feeds for both Facebook and Twitter.