Tag Archives: grilled

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about their platforms’ efforts to stem baseless election fraud claims and vaccine skepticism. Opaque algorithms that prioritize user engagement and promote misinformation also came under scrutiny. Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the House subcommittee on Communications and Technology, said his staff easily found anti-vaccine content on Facebook, Facebook’s… Source link

US campaign group SumOfUS has reviewed dozens of social media accounts, pages and groups – and says that the tech platforms’ “policies, algorithms, and tools directly fuelled” violence. Twitter, Facebook and Google “came up massively short in preventing the escalation of violence,” its report concluded. Source link

Of the tech titans, which included the CEOs of Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL), some fared better than others in the first hours of the hearing. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, acknowledged, albeit earnestly and transparently, that Amazon may have improperly used third-party seller data to inform its own product decisions — a key concern over the company’s approach to competition. Apple CEO Tim Cook, on the other hand, got off pretty lightly. Despite some early… Source link

Google’s Sundar Pichai faced an awkward line of enquiry during today’s House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing related to its 2007 acquisition of adtech platform DoubleClick, and how it went on to renege on an original promise to lawmakers and regulators that it would not (nor could not) merge DoubleClick data with Google account data — automagically doing just that almost a decade later. By linking internet users’ browsing data, as harvested via the DoubleClick cookie, to… Source link