BY ELIZABETH CULLIFORD
Top officials from Facebook Inc <FB.O>, Alphabet Inc’s <GOOGL.O> Google and Twitter Inc <TWTR.N> were grilled by U.S. lawmakers on Thursday at a virtual hearing on foreign influence and election security, ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential contest.
Leaders from Facebook and Twitter told the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that they had not seen evidence of coordinated foreign interference in conversations about absentee voting or about recent protests on anti-racism and policing.
However, Twitter’s director of global public policy strategy and development Nick Pickles said the company had seen a shift from platform manipulation to public tweets from state media and government accounts.
Democratic Representative Jim Himes pressed Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher on what the company was doing to deal with worries that its algorithm promotes polarization and anger. Gleicher said Facebook’s users did not want to see divisive content and the platform had refocused to emphasize content from friends and family.
The debate over content moderation has intensified in recent weeks as Twitter and Facebook diverged on how to handle inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, has accused social media companies of censorship and called for the government to roll back liability protections for tech platforms.
