Senate panel votes to authorize subpoena targeting Facebook, Google and Twitter executives

By Tony Romm
10/1/2020, 10:21:24 a.m.

A Senate committee voted Thursday to authorize subpoenas that could force the chief executives at Facebook, Google and Twitter to testify at an upcoming congressional hearing, escalating lawmakers’ war with Silicon Valley over their policies to police content online.

The vote gives the Senate Commerce Committee the power to compel the testimony of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey if they don’t agree to submit to questioning voluntarily. It marks a surprising bipartisan rebuke of the tech industry on the part of lawmakers long faulted for failing to hold top executives to account for their business practices.

“These CEOs can make time to spend a few hours with the committee,” said Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss..), the committee’s chairman, citing the need to explore the tech giants’ efforts to oversee “Americans’ speech at a critical time in our democratic process.”

Even as they voted to approve the subpoenas, Democrats still expressed early concern that the hearing threatened to devolve into a political affair, allowing Republicans to attack social-media sites ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

In recent weeks, Facebook and Twitter have sought to discipline President Trump for publishing false or dangerous content on their services, including posts that seek to cast doubt on mail-in voting. Trump and his allies have responded by assailing Silicon Valley over allegations that their actions amount to a form of political censorship -- a charge they and others strongly deny.

“This appears to me like an attempt to work the refs coming up to the election, and I sincerely hope to be proven wrong,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who along with fellow Democrats urged the committee to focus most of its attention on issues related to antitrust and privacy.

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