For good reason. Usually, these whistleblower sessions are used as a place to get sound bites for campaigning and give the CEO a tongue lashing. Due to the pending acquisition, this one has stakes that are about 100x higher than the typical whistleblower session. If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars.
Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children), and clearly has monetization/business problems. It also seems to have much worse engineering than other social businesses. It's going to be a lot harder to defend in one of these sessions than Facebook.
> Let's be real: Twitter is a huge cesspool of harassment, hosts a ton of pornography (including from children)
For the porn: So do Reddit and Facebook, with the latter having had multiple lawsuits by former content moderators for the uncountable amount of CSAM and gore [1]. The first "most popular" subreddit was r/NSFW, followed by r/gonewild - Reddit literally got big with porn.
As for harassment: Facebook with its closed groups is just as bad if not worse for radicalization (simply because way more people use it and no one monitors these groups, not to mention open channels such as newspaper comment sections), with direct links to deadly unrest such as in India [2]. Meta's other products are a horror show in themselves - Whatsapp has a history with mobs riled up by fake news to the point these have their own Wikipedia listicle [3] and Instagram has been under fire for years in helping to aid eating disorders [4].
It's bad enough that there are so many bad actors on Twitter, but the simple fact that Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit each year and doesn't even come close to the amount of moderation they would need makes them even worse.
US-style absolutist interpretations of "freedom of speech" always come at a serious cost - and in almost all cases marginalized people (people of color, jews, and most recently trans people) end up bearing that cost, while the majority society feels no impact.
And it's also precisely what helped such people the most. Abolition, and other pertinent topics, were regularly and vigorously discussed and debated in America. This was happening at the same time that in Britain calling for the end of the monarchy was punishable by death, later converted to merely life in prison. And incidentally, that is still the law in the UK [1]. Quite a relevant aside since while it was ostensibly not actively enforced, police are currently being quite heavy handed with protesters against the royal accession process, and that law gives them every legal right to do so.
The point there is that had we lived in a country where censoring speech was legal, there's every reason to believe even speaking of e.g. abolition could have landed you in jail, or worse. Would this have deterred change? Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing is for sure is that it'd have made the country a far less free place for everybody.
US-style absolutism about freedom of speech comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse.
It seems that much of the world has forgotten or willfully ignore these lessons.
The cost of freedom is that people will use it to do things you don't like.
Freedom isn't necessary for a society to function, lots of societies function without it, and have for most of human history.
Given the choice though, I prefer to live in a society that chooses to maximize liberty. Without freedom of speech, all other liberties are irrelevant.
>comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse.
Your country is barely 300 years old and has had a single constitution for its whole existence. The US has learned _no_ lessons through its existence. It's a country founded by colons who didn't want to pay taxes to the UK. The amount of lessons the US can give the world is about... none.
> US-style absolutism about freedom of speech comes from hard earned lessons about the other options being much worse.
I'm German. My ancestors should have shown the world just enough on where not restricting hate speech and conspiracy crap leads: into murder, into genocide, into the dissolution of democracy itself.
It's astonishing that the US hasn't realized this as well after Jan 6th. You all don't realize just how fucking close you came and how thin the edge is you all are standing on.
> I suspect that you may have learned the wrong lessons.
Holocaust denial is banned in the majority of European countries, and at least in some countries Nazi symbolics are banned as well [1].
I live maybe an hour away from the KZ Dachau and have visited it. It's hard to have any other stance than "antisemitism, racism and other similar discrimination must be banned at all costs" when you personally see the evidence just how depraved humans can be.
Let humans go unchecked and you get anything from online mobs driving trans people to suicide (Kiwifarms) over murder (Heather Heyer) and lone wolf terrorism (Christchurch) and finally, a putsch attempt. Then, once a strongman/dictator has taken over, you will eventually see ethnic cleansings and genocide (see e.g. Russia's Ukraine invasion).
Banning holocaust denial didn't stop germany and other european countries from having sizeable neo-nazi groups and to a wider extent white supremacy groups
how close to what? lets say the guys storming the capitol actually manage to do whatever they wanted to do there, then what? democracy is not a king of the hill game, they'd just be sieged out by the police/military if it came to it.
The only thing you ancestors showed us is that people like scapegoats when their economy is down the gutter, demoralized and in an era where war and overt systematic violence against ethnic minorities isn't uncommon.
> they'd just be sieged out by the police/military if it came to it
You really think that the police, especially federal police, would have disobeyed a direct request from the President asking them to stand down? There were only two completely random things that prevented an utter disaster at Jan 6th: Eugene Goodman, the brave cop redirecting the mob away just mere minutes after the Senate chamber was sealed [1], likely saving the Senators' lives, and Bobby Engel from the Secret Service [2], who reportedly resisted physical violence by the President himself and did not drive him to the Capitol as requested.
Had Trump been at the Capitol, I have absolutely zero doubt he would have crowned himself President that day - and that neither the Republican leadership nor the courts would have objected to this.
The capitol police doesn't report to the president. They absolutely would have laid siege to the place at the orders of their boss, Nancy Pelosi.
Also, you should check your sources (or rather, your sources' sources): there's a lot of fake news out about 1/6, a lot of it from "reliable" sources. The second story there is single-sourced from someone who wasn't in Trump's car whose story was disproven by someone who was actually in the car. The same outlets have been repeating the lie that one of the Trumpkins killed a capitol police officer with a fire extinguisher.
What makes you think that republican leadership and the courts(!!!!) wouldn't have objected to it? especially when republican leadership themselves were against it, to the point where the main target it seems of the mob was Mike Pence of all people.
"You really think that the police, especially federal police, would have disobeyed a direct request from the President asking them to stand down?"
This takes me back to my German friends confidently predicting that the election of George W. Bush was the dawn of Nazi America. No, George W. Bush isn't going to roll the army out of Iraq and conquer the entire Middle East. No, Trump isn't going to disband the free press with the assent of Congress. No, the Capital Police, who work for Congress, are not going to stand down and let rioters run rampant, and no, neither Republican leadership (which wasn't in charge of Congress in any case) nor the courts are going to let anyone crown himself president.
All of those are actual predictions I heard from Germans. Trump did crown himself president, with the result any American would have predicted: he was derided and ignored by the majority of the country, and the location wouldn't have mattered at all to that.
I totally get given your country's history why this stuff comes up. But some of it is very, very alien to an American cultural consciousness. It turns out countries differ from one another.
It's worth reading about the relationship between Trump and his generals to understand the attitude that the American military takes, and is expected and required by their oath to take, toward the president.
I am definitely not saying that fascism can't happen here. I'm saying that if it does it won't look like anything predictable from German history because there are vastly different cultural norms to bulldoze.
> If Parag Agrawal screws up at this hearing, it could literally cost him billions of dollars.
Good.
It is an indefensible house of cards where it can take someone like Mudge to just blow it up and give the regulators a reason to give a massive fine and put them under strict rules to do better, and they should give them massive fines.
Mudge won't blow it up. Regulators may go for $X00 million of fines, but that's it. The company will release a statement saying, "all of this is incorrect about our business, and we are inviting some congresspeople to come meet with us on a fact-finding trip." Rules might get a little stricter, but the lobbyists from Facebook and Google won't let them get strict enough to hurt them - and any rule that hurts Twitter materially will hurt FB a lot more. This kind of thing is a once-in-3-months occurrence now, and no meaningful changes ever come of it.
The only reason this one is different is because of the specter of Elon Musk's acquisition falling through.
Lindsey Graham committed to, in the testimony, working with Elizabeth Warren to create new rules, similar to Europe’s GDPR. Perhaps watching the testimony would change your mind.
Bloomberg: Grassley says Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined an invitation to appear today. Kurt Wagner Tech Reporter