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In October, Republican lawmakers on the U.S. Senate Judiciary
committee voted unanimously to approve formal summons for
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Democrats
on the panel did not vote on the subpoena.
The subpoenas were approved right after the social media
platforms decided to block stories from the New York Post that
made claims about the son of then Democratic presidential
candidate Joe Biden.
Tuesday's hearing is expected to be highly political.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey along with Alphabet-owned Google's Sundar
Pichai also appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee in
October for a hearing where Republican lawmakers questioned the
companies about their content moderation decisions. The hearing
quickly turned into a political scuffle with lawmakers attacking
each other.
Upset over the companies' decision on what to leave on the
platform and what to take down, many Republican lawmakers and
President Donald Trump have threatened to take away protections
for internet companies under a federal law called Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act. The law protects companies from
getting sued over material users post on their platforms.
Biden, now President-elect, has also said he favors repealing
Section 230. Congressional Democrats, however, prefer a more
deliberate approach to reforming the law.
At the hearing in October, Twitter's Dorsey said that eroding
Section 230 could significantly hurt how people communicate
online. Zuckerberg said he supports changing the law but also
said that tech platforms were likely to censor more to avoid
legal risks if the law is repealed.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; editing by Grant
McCool)
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