Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey will testify before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on September 5, the panel said on Friday.
Dorsey’s testimony is expected to center on Republicans’ concerns about social media companies removing content from conservatives ahead of the November midterms.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee ‘intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content,’ Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement.
‘We look forward to Mr. Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company’s algorithms and content judgment calls,’ Walden said.
On Friday, President Donald Trump accused social media companies of silencing ‘millions of people’ in an act of censorship.
‘Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can´t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!’ Trump wrote on Twitter, not mentioning any specific companies.
Trump also criticized social media outlets last week, saying that unidentified companies were ‘totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.’
Those tweets followed actions taken by Apple, Facebook and YouTube to ban Infowars, a website run by right-wing radio host Alex Jones.
Jones’ Twitter account was temporarily suspended on August 15.
This week, Facebook was forced to apologize to conservative non-profit PragerU after deleting videos that defended the concept of masculinity.
The social media company banned the videos as ‘hate speech’ before apologizing and saying the action had been taken in error after a public outcry.
On Friday, Facebook, Google and Twitter executives held a secret meeting in San Francisco to discuss their preparations for the midterm elections, BuzzFeed reported.
The meeting was ostensibly to coordinate the fight against Russian election interference, though conservative pundits seem more fearful of meddling from the tech giants themselves, in the form of censorship.
Last month, Trump accused Twitter of ‘shadow banning’ Republican politicians after a Vice report found that they were omitted from suggested search results.
Twitter fixed the issue and then claimed that it does not shadow ban accounts, in a blog post that also confessed to removing certain posts and content from other users’ feeds – the definition of shadow ban.
‘You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile),’ the company’s explanation read.
