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Trump Outraged: Jack Dorsey Faces Senate Subpoena After Twitter Blocks Biden Ukraine Scandal

The US Senate has announced that Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey will be called upon to testify about the recent incident in which the social media platform blocked users from sharing a NY Post story disclosing sensitive information on Joe Biden and his son’s alleged scandal in Ukraine.

Facebook and Twitter block Biden ‘fake news,’ Trump is furious

On top of Twitter restricting the New York Post article, Facebook also took action and said that it would “reduce the distribution of the article,” in an attempt to slow the spread of the news as the social network needed to fact-check the information. President Trump and the Republican party reacted with outrage, calling it an “election interference,” as the move comes 19 days before the US 2020 presidential election set for November 3.

The US Senate is planning to vote to subpoena Jack Dorsey, summoning his presence in front of the US Judiciary committee to explain social media companies’ logic behind locking users’ account, such as that of President Donald Trump.

Senator Ted Cruz said:

“We have seen big tech, we’ve seen Twitter and Facebook actively interfering in this election in a way that has no precedent in the history of our country.”

Numerous platforms including the Trump campaign account were blocked from re-tweeting the links pertaining to Biden and the Ukraine scandal his son and he was part of, as Facebook and Twitter both appealed to policies that said hacked material and personal information were at play.

According to people familiar with the talks, the information disclosed by NY Post was uncovered through Hunter Biden’s old computer.

Senator Cruz added that the vote will happen next Tuesday, to decide on whether CEO Dorsey needed to testify at the end of the week. Cruz added that it was to “explain why Twitter is abusing corporate power to silence the press.”

Following the censorship from Twitter, President Trump had made his anger explicitly known, as the article was related to his opponent Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s involvement in a Ukrainian company. The US president expressed his fury through his twitter and said:

“So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of ‘Smoking Gun’ emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!”

Referencing Section 230 of a communications law, President Trump called out Twitter’s move in taking down the story as a terrible one and threatened to cancel a bill that served to protect companies from being held responsible for content posted by users on their sites.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologizes

Following the political commotion that was caused by Twitter’s move, CEO Jack Dorsey publicly apologized for his company’s actions, saying that it lacked adequate justification at the time of the deed. He explained that Twitter operated in a way in which fake news and hacked materials were immediately flagged, as the article was deliberated to be fake news, having information provided by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, which may have contained misinformation. He explained his actions by linking Twitter’s official Safety Department’s statement, which read:

“The images contained in the articles include personal and private information – like email addresses and phone numbers – which violate our rules.”

Twitter Safety added an update this morning, which disclosed:

“We also currently view materials included in the articles as violations of our Hacked Materials Policy.”

Big Tech – Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook – have been facing ongoing heat from the US Congress for quite some time, as the Judiciary Committee is threatening to break up the monopoly and dominance the tech giants hold over the industry by coming up with regulatory policies aimed at anti-competitive practices.

Is decentralization the answer for Twitter and tech?

The way in which the incident was handled begs the question of whether social platforms as huge as Twitter could benefit from a blockchain and decentralized protocol

Jack Dorsey has long expressed his support of blockchain technology and the mainstream cryptocurrency which revolutionized it – Bitcoin – hinting that Twitter was also making its way in becoming decentralized, as “the more we’re giving the individual the keys, the safer we’re going to be.”

If that were to happen, censorship resistance would happen on Twitter, as the underlying infrastructure would run on distributed ledger technology (DLT). A DLT system has crucial aspects which include “persistence, transparency, standardization, and censorship resistance.”

In other words, once a user uploads content onto a platform, the move will essentially be irreversible on the chain, making censorship potentially obsolete and giving more power to individuals to regulate the platform, as opposed to a fully centralized entity.

Twitter and Facebook Grilled in Senate Hearing Over Social Media Censorship of US Presidential Election

Facebook and Twitter are facing heat from US Congress for how they handled political misinformation circulating on social media platforms during the 2020 US presidential elections.

In a congressional hearing with the US Judiciary Committee, Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey were called to testify virtually for the way political posts were handled on the platforms during the presidential campaign opposing Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Numerous political posts were flagged on both Facebook and Twitter as misinformation and taken down on numerous occasions, much to the fury of political leaders.

The US Judiciary Committee vehemently declared that the tech giants had too much power in their hands, with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham remarking:

“It seems like you’re the ultimate editor. When you have companies that have the power of governments and have far more power than traditional media outlets, something has to give.”

During the US presidential elections opposing Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, a New York Times article exposing Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s alleged scandal in Ukraine had circulated on Twitter and Facebook. The story was immediately taken down, under the pretext that it promoted misleading information.

In addition to this incident, Twitter has increasingly limited and flagged President Donald Trump’s tweets concerning election fraud and political misinformation, with a disclaimer under Trump’s tweets which read, “Multiple sources called this election differently.”

More than 300,000 tweets flagged during US election

The actions of the tech giants have left political parties on both ends infuriated, as both Republican Senators and Democratic representatives alike have called for a reform of Section 230. This section protects online platform hosts like Facebook and Twitter from being held accountable for content that social media users upload.

While Senator Graham argued that tech giants had too much power in their hands and that this needs to be changed, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said that more actions needed to be taken against the political misinformation prompted by President Trump’s tweets.

As shared by several sources, Blumenthal said:

“The president has used this megaphone (social media) to spread vicious falsehoods in an apparent attempt to overturn the will of voters.”

Jack Dorsey confirmed that Twitter had flagged more than 300,000 tweets in order to stop misinformation from spreading on the platform during the 2020 election period. He said:

“More than a year ago, the public asked us to offer additional context to help make potentially misleading information more apparent. We did exactly that, applying labels to over 300,000 tweets from October 27 to November 11, which represented about 2.2% of all US election-related tweets.”

Facebook and Twitter stand by their actions

Both the Twitter CEO and Facebook’s Zuckerberg were open to the idea of amending Section 230. However, they said that the social media platforms were not to be treated as publishers or as traditional media websites. Both tech moguls stood by their company’s action, with Zuckerberg asserting:

“We strengthened our enforcement against conspiracy networks and other groups to help prevent them from using our platform to organize violence or civil unrest in the period after the election.”

Facebook had displayed a disclaimer warning of false claims for more than 150 million posts flagged, and also removed incorrect posts reporting additional information on the situation surrounding voting polls.

Is blockchain the answer to misinformation and centralized power?

The congressional hearing comes at a time when US authorities and global legislations have increasingly attempted to curb the monopoly of tech giants, namely the Big Tech – Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple. Antitrust hearings have been conducted with US Capitol Hill to address the ways in which Big Tech leveraged their power to thwart competitive companies in the tech industry.

With the rise in power of these tech corporate giants, the question of whether decentralization is the answer has come to light. With blockchain technology, information is regulated by everyone using the chain, and there is no central power. As the concentration of power on distributed ledger technology is technologically impossible, blockchain may provide more security in an environment where the trust in centralized authorities is questioned.

Previously, Dorsey has hinted that Twitter was moving towards becoming an open-source media protocol, where content would be regulated by platform users. Dorsey has been known to be bullish on Bitcoin and to favor blockchain as a transformative technology. When discussing security in a technological age, he previously said:

“The more we’re giving the individual the keys, the safer we’re going to be.”

Global Governments Request More Personal Data from Big Tech

The issue of how Big Tech companies handle user data has been a topic of debate for some time. Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are often accused of collecting and selling the personal data of their users. However, the exact destination of this data and the extent to which companies and governments have access to it remain unclear. A recent study by Surfshark sheds light on the rising trend of government requests for personal user data from Big Tech firms.

The study, which focused on the period from 2013 to 2021, found that requests for personal data have been increasing over time. The year 2020 saw the largest year-over-year increase of 38%, followed by a 25% increase in 2021. The survey included Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, with Meta having the most accounts of interest from authorities. Two out of five accounts hosted by Meta were requested (6.6 million) during the study period. Apple, on the other hand, had the fewest, with just 416,000 requested accounts from global authorities.

The report reveals that 60% of the requests for personal data came from authorities in the United States and Europe. However, the U.S. requested more than double the accounts per 100,000 users than all countries in the European Union combined. The top countries following the U.S. in terms of data requests were Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and France.

According to the study, most data requests are related to criminal investigations and civil or administrative cases in which digital data is necessary. Gabriele Kaveckyte, a member of the privacy counsel at Surfshark, highlights that authorities are also exploring ways to monitor and tackle crime via online services. While this can help solve serious criminal cases, civil society organizations have expressed concerns about the promotion of surveillance techniques.

The tech companies’ disclosure rate of user data has increased by nearly 71%, with Apple leading the pack with an average disclosure rate of 86% in 2021 and 82% across the study period. However, Big Tech’s monopoly on user information has led to calls for decentralized solutions such as Web3 tools to safeguard personal data. Some have even suggested that Web2 platforms like Facebook and Twitter will become obsolete thanks to blockchain technology.

In February, a decentralized version of Twitter called Damus officially launched in app stores, offering a “social network you control.” Even Big Tech companies have begun to break into the Web3 space, with Meta unsuccessfully introducing nonfungible tokens on Instagram and Facebook. Despite these efforts, there is still much debate and uncertainty regarding the handling of personal data by tech companies and the extent of government access to such data.

European Commission Launches Research Unit to Investigate Algorithms Used by Big Tech

The European Commission has taken a significant step towards regulating Big Tech by launching a new research unit called the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT). The primary focus of ECAT is to investigate the impact of algorithms made and used by prominent online platforms and search engines such as Facebook and Google. The team will analyze and evaluate the AI-backed algorithms used by Big Tech firms to identify and address any potential risks posed by these platforms.

The European Union’s existing Joint Research Centre will embed ECAT, which conducts research on a broad range of subjects including artificial intelligence. The team will consist of data scientists, AI experts, social scientists, and legal experts. The group’s focus will be to conduct algorithmic accountability and transparency audits, as required by the Digital Services Act, a set of European Union rules enforceable as of Nov. 16, 2022.

AI-based programs are built using a series of complex algorithms, meaning ECAT will also be looking at algorithms that underpin AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which some believe could eventually replace search engines. The team will examine the algorithms used by Big Tech firms to ensure that they are transparent and that their operations do not harm users.

According to Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, ECAT will “look under the hood” of large search engines and online platforms to “see how their algorithms function and contribute to the spread of illegal and harmful content.” This move by the European Commission is a significant development in regulating Big Tech firms, and it will ensure that these companies are held accountable for the impact of their algorithms on society.

The development of AI has been a contentious issue, with nearly a dozen EU politicians calling for the “safe” development of AI in a signed open letter on April 16. The lawmakers asked United States President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to convene a summit on AI and agree on a set of governing principles for the development, control, and deployment of the tech.

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk also expressed his concerns about the development of AI. He argued on an April 17 Fox News interview that AI chatbots like ChatGPT have a left-wing bias and said that he was developing an alternative called “TruthGPT.” This move by Musk highlights the growing concerns about the ethical implications of AI and its impact on society.

In conclusion, the launch of ECAT by the European Commission is a significant development in regulating Big Tech firms. It will ensure that these companies are held accountable for the impact of their algorithms on society, and it will also help to identify and address any potential risks posed by these platforms. The team of experts at ECAT will play a vital role in conducting algorithmic accountability and transparency audits to ensure that the algorithms used by Big Tech firms are transparent and do not harm users.