How to watch Facebook and Twitter’s big hearings with Congress

NelsonG · September 5, 2018

On Wednesday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will appear before Congress in the latest high profile hearings for tech on Capitol Hill. The main event will take place at 9:30 a.m. ET, as the pair of tech execs faces the defense and cybersecurity-minded Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

Following that hearing, Dorsey will stick around for a chat with the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing set for 1:30 p.m ET. For a thorough preview, you can catch Facebook and Twitter’s opening statements.

In the Senate hearing, expect most of the discussion to focus on the company’s efforts to thwart coordinated efforts by US adversaries to influence domestic politics. Titled “Foreign Influence Operations and Their Use of Social Media Platforms,” the hearing will give some of the Senate’s most tech-savvy members a chance to take their questions and concerns straight to the top.

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As the name suggests, the conversation will likely center on social media disinformation campaigns in relation to the upcoming US midterm elections and the cybersecurity efforts made to detect and prevent them. The hearing could also tap into recent conversations around censorship and harassment, though those topics aren’t intended to be the meat of the conversation.

You should be able to stream tomorrow’s Senate hearing below. If that stream isn’t working, the committee will likely stream the hearing on its own event page or you can check C-SPAN’s designated hearing page for a live stream with light commentary.

Compared to the day’s first hearing, the House hearing is a bit more unpredictable. Titled “Twitter: Transparency and Accountability,” the House’s conversation will likely be exploratory rather than solution-oriented in nature, delving into deeply partisan topics around political bias and censorship. Without Facebook by his side to catch some of the heat, Dorsey will be holding his own alone so that alone might make it worth a watch.

In a press release, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden described the decision to call on Dorsey:

“This hearing is about transparency, accountability, and action. We want to take complex, opaque algorithms out of the dark and shed light on the role they play in consumers’ lives. We want to better understand the decisions Twitter makes about content and the company’s process to prevent mistakes and undue bias. The committee takes these issues seriously on behalf of consumers, and expects the same of Twitter.”

If you’d like to tune in to the House hearing, you should be able to stream it live below. If that doesn’t work, the committee’s own landing page should be streaming the hearing.