TOPLINE Tech CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey will soon have to answer to lawmakers about the rise of misinformation on their platforms and how they plan to address it, as the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced Thursday a hearing with the Facebook, Google and Twitter leaders will take place on March 25.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h3>



Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey—who lead Facebook, Google and Twitter, respectively—will testify at a remote hearing on “misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms,” the House committee announced.



The hearing will further the committee’s work of “holding online platforms accountable” for the issues on their platforms, committee chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and subcommittee chairs Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in a statement.



The lawmakers singled out misinformation on election fraud and the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccine as particular matters of concern.



The tech leaders have previously&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/facebook-twitter-ceos-senate-judiciary-committee-prepared-testimony.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">testified</a>&nbsp;before lawmakers in recent months, including an October&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/facebook-google-and-twitter-ceos-testify-in-congress-over-section-230-live-updates.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hearing</a>&nbsp;with all three CEOs before the Senate Commerce Committee on Section 230, which shields tech companies from legal liability for the content their users post.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-crucial-quote">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h3>



“For far too long, big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they’ve played in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences. Industry self-regulation has failed,” Pallone, Doyle and Schakowsky said in a statement. “We must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER</h3>



93%. That’s the percentage of Americans who say they are either very or somewhat about the spread of misinformation on the internet, according to a Gallup/Knight Foundation&nbsp;<a href="https://knightfoundation.org/articles/most-americans-would-believe-social-media-misinformation-warnings/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">study</a>&nbsp;conducted in September.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tangent">TANGENT</h3>



The House Judiciary Committee also separately announced plans to investigate big tech Thursday, unveiling a series of antitrust hearings aimed at curbing tech giants’ market dominance as it develops antitrust legislation. The renewed investigation will continue the antitrust subcommittee’s ongoing work probing the tech giants and their monopolistic power, which included a July&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/07/29/republicans-use-tech-antitrust-hearing-to-rail-against-anti-conservative-bias/?sh=6f7e186855aa">hearing</a>&nbsp;with Dorsey, Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h3>



Online misinformation and its spread on major social networks has come under significant scrutiny in recent months, particularly amid the Covid-19 pandemic and around the November election. Social media companies have taken significant&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/01/31/heres-how-facebook-twitter-and-tiktok-are-battling-coronavirus-misinformation/?sh=2dfca99c6651">steps</a>&nbsp;to curb the spread of false information, such as Twitter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/09/twitter-new-rules-try-to-prevent-election-and-trump-related-chaos-misinformation/?sh=262d250f6840">adding safeguards</a>&nbsp;to limit sharing posts that have been flagged for misinformation and Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/18/facebook-continues-fight-against-misinformation-plans-to-debunk-climate-change-myths/?sh=7cac8aee4804">announcing</a>&nbsp;Thursday new efforts to combat misinformation around climate change. Despite their efforts, however, misinformation still continues to persist: an October study by the German Marshall Fund of the United States&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/12/facebook-users-interacting-with-misinformation-way-more-now-than-in-2016-study-finds/?sh=403d34415973">found</a>&nbsp;that engagement with false content producers on Facebook had gone up by 102% since 2016, for instance, while a September&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news/releases/covid-related-misinformation-videos-spread-primarily-through-facebook-as-its-fact-checkers-fail-to-spot-false-information-finds-new-oxford-study/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">study</a>&nbsp;from the University of Oxford found Facebook’s third-party fact checkers had only caught less than one percent of Covid-19 misinformation videos on the platform.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h3>



<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/18/house-antitrust-amazon-apple-facebook-google/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">House to grill Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs as Washington seeks to crack down on disinformation, antitrust</a>&nbsp;(Washington Post)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/18/facebook-continues-fight-against-misinformation-plans-to-debunk-climate-change-myths/?sh=7cac8aee4804">Facebook Continues Fight Against Misinformation, Plans To Debunk Climate Change Myths</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/01/31/heres-how-facebook-twitter-and-tiktok-are-battling-coronavirus-misinformation/?sh=2dfca99c6651">Here’s How Facebook, Twitter And TikTok Are Battling Coronavirus Misinformation</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/12/facebook-users-interacting-with-misinformation-way-more-now-than-in-2016-study-finds/?sh=403d34415973">Facebook Users Interacting With Misinformation Way More Now Than In 2016, Study Finds</a> (Forbes)



By Alison Durkee, Forbes Staff

US-politics-computers-internet

Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs Set To Testify About Misinformation

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is planning to unify the underlying messaging infrastructure of the WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger services and incorporate end-to-end encryption into these apps, the New York Times reported.



The three services will, however, continue as stand-alone apps, the report said, citing four people involved in the effort.



Facebook said it is working on adding end-to-end encryption, which protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in a conversation, to more of its messaging products, and considering ways to make it easier for users to connect across networks.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“There is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” a spokesperson said.</blockquote>



After the changes, a Facebook user, for instance, will be able send an encrypted message to someone who has only a WhatsApp account, according to the New York Times report.



Integrating the messaging services could make it harder for antitrust regulators to break up Facebook by undoing its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, said Sam Weinstein, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.



“If Facebook is worried about that then one way it can defend itself is to integrate those services,” Weinstein said.



But Weinstein said breaking up Facebook is viewed as an “extreme remedy” by regulators, particularly in the United States, so concerns over antitrust scrutiny may not have been a factor behind the integration.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">MAJOR TRADEOFFS</h4>



Some former Facebook security engineers and an outside encryption expert said the plan could be good news for user privacy, in particular by extending end-to-end encryption.



“I’m cautiously optimistic it’s a good thing,” said former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now teaches at Stanford University. “My fear was that they were going to drop end-to-end encryption.”



However, the technology does not always conceal metadata &#8211; information about who is talking to whom &#8211; sparking concern among some researchers that the data might be shared.



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Any metadata integration likely will let Facebook learn more about users, linking identifiers such as phone numbers and email addresses for those using the services independently of each other.



Facebook could use that data to charge more for advertising and targeted services, although it also would have to forgo ads based on message content in Messenger and Instagram.



Other major tradeoffs will have to be made too, Stamos and others said.



Messenger allows strangers to contact people without knowing their phone numbers, for example, increasing the risk of stalking and approaches to children.



Systems based on phone numbers have additional privacy concerns, because governments and other entities can easily extract location information from them.



Stamos said he hoped Facebook would get public input from terrorism experts, child safety officers, privacy advocates and others and be transparent in its reasoning when it makes decisions on the details.



“It should be an open process, because you can’t have it all,” Stamos said. -Reuters



-Munsif Vengattil, Jan Wolfe and Joseph Menn 



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Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs Set To Testify About Misinformation

Zuckerberg to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger