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Party leaders in the House on Thursday added a new pair to the constellation of classic brand rivalries like Coke vs. Pepsi, Ford vs. Chevy and iOS vs. Android: Twitter vs. Facebook.
In the debate over whether social-media giants should try to filter out false or objectionable information disseminated via their platforms, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, on Thursday took Twitter’s TWTR, -1.94% corner, praising its decision to label some of President Donald Trump’s tweets as questionable.
Also see:Trump executive order to punish social-media platforms is largely toothless, legal experts say
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican who’s also from California, took the side of Facebook FB, +0.53%, praising CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stance that social-media companies shouldn’t view themselves as “arbiters of truth.”
The pair’s remarks came ahead of the release of Trump’s executive order asking agencies to review a key provision of law protecting social-media companies’ ability to moderate their platforms, Section 230 of the Telecommunications Acts of 1996. They also reflected a growing partisan split over the social-media companies’ approaches.
Now read:Trump signs order aimed at revising legal protection of social-media companies
No company wants to be seen as being aligned with only with one party, and Silicon Valley in general was slow to get into the lobbying game in Washington. But if social-media preferences become another front in the country’s ongoing politico-culture wars, Silicon Valley may have little choice but to ramp things up, according to one Capitol Hill veteran.
“After the latest back and forth, Big Tech was already facing a rocky road ahead on Capitol Hill, but now it’s going to get much worse,” said Jim Manley, a former spokesman for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat. “They can try to buy their way out of this mess by throwing campaign cash around, but they are rapidly losing friends on Capitol Hill.”
Pelosi objected to the idea of lifting the legal protections for moderation but also expressed exasperation at the social-media companies. “I think it’s outrageous, but it’s an outrageous situation,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference.
She praised Twitter for moving to put disclaimers on Trump’s tweets regarding mail-in voting but said it had not gone far enough.
She referred to a series of tweets in recent weeks by Trump where he tied former Republican congressman–turned–TV host Joe Scarborough to the death of an intern almost 20 years ago.
On May 12, Trump tweeted, “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
He has since posted variations on that tweet. Trump has pointed to no evidence for his accusation.
Right-wing talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh said Trump was exhibiting cleverness and subtlety in trafficking in this and other conspiracy theories without explicitly staking out a position on their veracity. “Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts,” Limbaugh said on his show, as the Daily Beast reported. “He’s simply passing them on.”
Limbaugh continued: “So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames.”
“While Twitter is putting up their fact check under what the president says about voting, they still won’t take off the misrepresentation the president is putting out there about the death of a gentleman whose wife died and asked for them to take down the president’s misrepresentation,” Pelosi said.
“So, yes, we like Twitter to fact check the president, but it seems to be very selective.”
Facebook has made billions of dollars while many users have become increasingly reliant on social media during the coronavirus lockdown, Pelosi said, adding, of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “You see what Zuckerberg is saying today about all of this — they just pander,” she said.
But she allowed Facebook was not unique among social-media companies. “They’re all about making money. Their business model is to make money [even] at the expense of the truth and facts that they know.”
McCarthy sided firmly with Facebook, saying Twitter’s approach to fact checking was biased.
“I agree with what Zuckerberg when he said that social media shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” McCarthy said.
“I’ve watched what social media has been able to do. There’s concern from [a] monopoly perspective on some. But I think what Mark Zuckerberg said is the approach they should take, and I think what the president is doing is correct.”
McCarthy said that when Republicans were in control of the House they called in the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet GOOG, +0.85% GOOGL, +0.83% for questioning.
“I think Congress should actually have hearings. When I was majority leader, that’s what we did,” he said.
Asked if it was appropriate of Trump to accuse Scarborough of murder over Twitter, McCarthy declined to answer, saying he had answered it Wednesday, when he told reporters he was not in the House of Representatives at the same time Scarborough was a member and had not read a much-discussed Wall Street Journal editorial accusing Trump of smearing Scarborough.
Twitter and Facebook both have Washington lobby shops, but they have vastly different budgets.
Twitter has spent $350,000 this year on its Washington lobbying efforts through March 31, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s after the company spent $1.48 million last year — its biggest annual outlay on lobbying ever, but far less than the $16.7 million that Facebook shelled out in 2019.
Twitter recently has lobbied on a GOP bill providing for Federal Trade Commission audits of social-media companies for political bias, a Democratic bill on net neutrality and a bipartisan bill aimed at targeting child sexual exploitation.
Manley said Facebook faces its own problems if control of the Senate shifts to Democratic hands.
“If the Senate flips, Facebook better triple their already massive lobbying budget because there will be hell to pay on Capitol Hill,” he said. “They have made their deal with the devil and will now have to live with it.”
Also read:Here’s how Twitter has lobbied on free-speech issues as Trump threatens company
