Diamond And Silk Came To Congress And They All Started Screaming At Each Other About Facebook

In the eyes of Republican lawmakers, Facebook, Google and Twitter are biased against conservatives. The Internet giants suppress their videos, posts and ads, while censoring their favorite right-leaning news and views — and perhaps should be boycotted by users if they don’t change their ways.

And for more than three hours on Thursday, Republican leaders and mega-popular conservative bloggers such as Diamond and Silk sought to make themselves heard, loudly, at a hearing on what Democrats described as a grand conspiracy theory.

The war of words unfolded before the House Judiciary Committee, where representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter had been invited to testify at a session about social media and filtering practices. The Internet giants ultimately declined to attend, an absence that prompted the panel’s leader, Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte (Va.), to promise to “pursue whatever means necessary” to question them — a potential threat of a subpoena still to come.

[Who are Diamond and Silk? How two small-town ex-Democrats found fame as ‘warriors’ for Trump.]

Driving the hearing was the controversy around Diamond and Silk, two supporters of President Trump who have alleged that Facebook sent them a message describing the videos on their Facebook page as “unsafe to the community.” Facebook has said that the bloggers’ description of that message was “inaccurate,” noting it had reached out repeatedly to Diamond and Silk to discuss and fix the problem. Nevertheless, the blogging duo has continued to claim that Facebook has wronged them.

At times yelling at lawmakers, Lynnette Hardaway, known as Diamond, alleged at the hearing that “Facebook along with other social media sites have taken aggressive actions to silence conservative voices like ourselves.”

Hardaway and her peer, Rochelle Richardson, or Silk, later charged that Trump and other conservative icons, such as Sarah Palin, are being censored, though they did not offer evidence to support the accusations. The duo testified under oath.

[Facebook didn’t read the terms and conditions for the app behind Cambridge Analytica]

The bloggers were also asked whether they had ever been paid by the Trump campaign. They initially insisted they had not been, even though a federal campaign finance record shows otherwise, but later clarified that the payment was the result of a refunded plane ticket.

At another moment, Hardaway displayed screen images of her ads preference page, which showed that Facebook had identified her profile as “very liberal” and thus, she said, had been showing her ads relevant to that bias. Hardaway argued that she could not change the label on her page, even though Facebook allows users to reverse the label on its site.

The accusations of anti-conservative bias hardly sat well with Democrats on the panel, who slammed Republicans for failing to hold hearings on what they said are more substantive issues involving tech companies — such as Facebook’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed names, “likes” and other personal information about 87 million of Facebook’s users.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who was asked to testify before the panel, attributed the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry to a “carefully manufactured fear of the American right that everybody is out to get them,” arguing that the hearing was meant to mobilize conservative voters.

In one of the tensest, loudest exchanges at the hearing, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) went so far as to charge that by being at the hearing Hardaway and Richardson were simply gaining a “tremendous platform … to make a ton of money when this is over.”

“You’re not gonna brush us off and dismiss us like we have no merit here,” Hardaway loudly shot back.

If anything, the partisan warfare on display Thursday illustrated deeply held fears about the secretive, powerful algorithms that shape the content that Web users see, view, read or consume on major online platforms. For Republicans, the concerns feel especially relevant because Facebook, Google and Twitter are based in liberal-leaning Silicon Valley.

The controversy flared earlier this month when lawmakers grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at two hearings focused on the company’s privacy practices. Republican lawmakers repeatedly pressed Zuckerberg on his company’s handling of Diamond and Silk, and some prominent conservatives, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), accused the company of a “pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.”

In response, Zuckerberg said he understood “where that concern is coming from, because Facebook in the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place.” He said that a key focus for the social network is “making sure that we do not have any bias in the work that we do.”

With no one from the tech industry on hand to defend the Internet giants on Thursday, GOP leaders came armed with a litany of complaints — that Facebook, Google and Twitter had taken aim at everything from religious groups to gun organizations that were supported in some way by conservatives; that their efforts to combat hate and abuse online are disguises for taking aim at Republicans; that Facebook’s decision to change its algorithms to prioritize content from friends and family over news — which the company said was meant to lessen tension on the platform — has “disproportionately harmed conservative publishers,” in the words of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.).

“The social media companies continue to silence conservative viewpoints,” Smith said, suggesting that users should either “support alternative platforms or boycott the biased media.”

Appearing as a witness, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), lamented the “black box of an algorithm” that powers these platforms, questioning: “Why is it the mistakes always seem to run in one direction?”

Blackburn found herself in a battle  with Twitter after the site prohibited her from sponsoring a tweet for her 2018 Senate campaign that promoted her efforts to fight the sale of “baby body parts.” While Twitter allowed Blackburn to tweet the video, it initially said she could not pay to advertise it because it violated the site’s policies against “inflammatory” ads. Facing a fury of criticism, however, Twitter reversed course.

Democrats on the panel acknowledged the need for a hearing on how tech giants make decisions about their online platforms. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said there’s great interest in convening a session “about how filtering works on private social media platforms.”

Yet Thursday’s tense back-and-forth amounted to a distraction to Democrats such as Johnson.

“We could be here for a lot of reasons this morning. We could be looking into manipulation of Facebook by the Russians to help Donald Trump get elected. We could be looking into Russian interference with the presidential election. We could be looking into Russian hacking of state election processes. We could be talking in this committee about legislation to protect the Mueller investigation,” Johnson said. “None of those areas has this committee been involved with during the last 15 months we’ve been in session.”