Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday was the only social media head who complied with members of two congressional subcommittees who demanded answers simply be "yes" or "no" due to time constraints.
Perhaps Dorsey respected the limit since his own platform famously restricts tweets to 280 characters — originally 140.
Still, he was able to exact a bit of revenge while the hearing was still in progress, The Hill noted, when at about 2:30 p.m. he tweeted a poll with simply a question mark and the responses "Yes" and "No."
As of late Thursday evening, "Yes" was winning 2-1 with a little more than 73,000 votes.
Rep. Mike Doyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, asked Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the head of Google and its parent Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, if their platforms bear any responsibility for disseminating "Stop the Steal" disinformation alleging the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Doyle demanded a yes or no answer.
"Yes, but you also have to take into consideration a broader ecosystem," Dorsey said. "It's not just about the technology platforms we use."
Doyle cut off Zuckerberg when he responded that Facebook's responsibility is to "build effective systems," and said individuals who organized the events and those who questioned the election's outcome, including Trump, deserved blame. When Doyle asked Pichai if his statement that "we always feel a deep sense of responsibility" amounted to a "yes," the CEO said it was a "complex question."
The exchange set the tone for a tense back and forth between the leaders of the world's most powerful social media networks and lawmakers eager to hold them accountable over how they police falsehoods on COVID-19, vaccines and the election on their internet services. Many committee members also pressed the executives on the negative impact of their products on children and teenagers.
The executives appeared on Thursday before members of two U.S. House Energy and Commerce subcommittees during a virtual hearing examining social media's role in promoting extremism and disinformation.
While some lawmakers have been seeking tighter regulations of online content for years, pressure is increasing on tech companies to more aggressively curtail violent and misleading material on their platforms following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead and many more injured.
In recent months, Democrats have been pushing the tech giants to do more to rid conspiracy theories from their websites about COVID-19 and the vaccine that prevents its symptoms.
"The witnesses here today have demonstrated time and again that promises to self-regulate don't work," said Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee, in an opening statement. "They must be held accountable for allowing disinformation and misinformation to spread across their platforms, infect our public discourse and threaten our democracy."
Bloomberg News contributed.
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