Facebook, Twitter, YouTube execs to testify at Senate hearing on algorithms

Executives from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will testify next week at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on social media algorithms and amplification, the panel announced Friday.

The hearing will feature Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, Alexandra Veitch, YouTube’s director of government affairs and public policy for the Americas and emerging markets, and Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy. 

Along with the executives, Tristan Harris, co-founder and president of the Center for Humane Technology, and Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, will testify at the hearing. 

The Senate subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law will look into the impact of the design of social media platforms. 

It comes as lawmakers have increasingly pressed the platforms over their algorithms and content moderation practices, especially Democrats who have raised concerns that the platforms have helped facilitate the spread of extremist content.

In the House, lawmakers pressed the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube parent company Google in a hearing last month with similar concerns about the spread of misinformation and the role of their platforms in the organizing of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.