In the latest congressional hearings on misinformation and election interference, which featured first-time appearances by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, the companies committed to trying to get better at explaining how their automated systems work to serve up, sort and block content on their social networks, and how they spot material that needs to be removed.
“There’s a lot of confusion around our rules and around our enforcement,” Dorsey said during solo testimony at an afternoon hearing in the US House of Representatives focused on content decisions. “We intend to fix it.”
Facebook and Twitter have drawn vast audiences and built their businesses for years by touting themselves as open forums for debate and free expression, yet their revenue has mainly depended on opaque ad-targeting and data-collection practices.
As they work to become more open and satisfy lawmakers’ demands, the companies are walking a fine line – pledging to improve transparency while stopping short of promising they can solve the problems that made the hearings necessary to begin with, such as abuse, misinformation and manipulation.
