Oklahoma Congressman Markwayne Mullin’s back in Washington this week preparing for a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing into Twitter and problems with transparency and accountability.
The hearing will be held Wednesday and feature Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter. While Twitter is among the top ten or 15 most viewed websites in the world, it had revenue of $2.44 billion for the fiscal year 2017.
In July, Twitter was accused of limiting the visibility of some public figures by preventing their profiles from appearing in the site’s auto-populated drop-down search bar results. The highest profile individuals impacted were associated with one political party and it prompted allegations of algorithmic bias.
Conservatives attacked Twitter but Twitter denied the claims. It’s the not the first such claims against Twitter. The company faced similar allegations during the 2016 Presidential campaign primaries. Then in October of 2017, Twitter barred the campaign video of one member of the House Energy Committee, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, deeming it “inflammatory” and “likely to evoke a strong negative reaction, “though this decision was later reversed.”
Among the questions the committee wants to ask is how Twitter blocks, deprioritizes or promotes certain speech or content through the use of its algorithms or any other means.
The committee plans to ask how Twitter monitors user accounts for compliance with the Twitter User Agreement and Twitter rules.
The hearing will begin at 12:30 p.m. Oklahoma time.