The CEOs of some of the biggest tech platforms defended the way they handle online speech to an audience of skeptical senators, many of whom seemed more interested in scoring political points than engaging with thorny debate over content moderation policies and algorithms.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai appeared virtually Wednesday at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee that was supposed to focus on a decades-old legal shield insulating tech companies from liability over what users post.

But many Republicans on the committee used the opportunity to berate the executives over suspicions that their companies and employees are biased against conservatives — a frequent complaint on the right for which there is no systematic evidence. Several members pressed Dorsey about Twitter’s decision — later reversed — to block links to a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son.

“Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas bellowed at Twitter’s chief executive in one of the hearing’s most theatrical moments.

Dorsey, a yoga devotee who says he tries to meditate every day, quietly responded that users agree to Twitter’s terms of service when they sign up, and said Twitter did not have the ability to influence elections.

Democrats mainly focused their questions on what steps the platforms are taking to protect from election interference and crack down on hate speech and radicalization, as well as how the tech companies have contributed to the downfall of local news media by sapping advertising spending.

Several Democratic members called foul on the timing of the hearing, just six days before the election. “We have to call this hearing what it is, it’s a sham,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “I’m not going to use my time to ask any questions because this is nonsense.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut accused his Republican colleagues of wanting to “bully and browbeat these platforms” into favoring President Trump.

Bipartisan agreement that Section 230 should change — but not about why or how

All of the companies have changed their policies this year about what posts are allowed about voting and the election. Facebook and Twitter in particular have taken increasingly aggressive action against posts that make false claims about voting or undermine confidence in the electoral process — including putting warning labels on some of the president’s most inflammatory attacks on voting by mail.

The law in question, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is under attack from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, but for very different reasons.

Republicans say it gives cover for tech platforms to unfairly censor conservatives, including President Trump, while Democrats say the companies should have to take more responsibility for the hate speech, false claims and other harmful content that proliferate on their platforms.

“The reality is that people have very different ideas and views about where the lines should be. Democrats often say that we don’t remove enough content, and Republicans often say that we remove too much,” Zuckerberg told senators.

Trump says the law should be revoked, and his Justice Department has asked Congress to pass legislation holding platforms more accountable for what their users post.

Biden has also said the law should be revoked. House Democrats have introduced their own bill that would hold tech companies liable if their algorithms amplify or recommend “harmful, radicalizing content that leads to offline violence.”

Tech executives say legal shield is essential to promote online speech

On Wednesday, the CEOs told the committee they agreed that the law should be updated to reflect the current state of the world, 24 years after it was first written. But they defended its legal protections and warned that removing it entirely would result in their companies taking a heavier hand with user content.

They noted that Section 230 not only makes them largely immune from liability of what users post, but also empowers them to make decisions about what content to remove and what to allow.

Dorsey and Zuckerberg said there should be more “transparency” about the decisions that online platforms make when determining what content can stay up and what they take down.

Dorsey said he agreed with critics that the companies’ policies can feel “like a black box” to outsiders.

“Section 230 is the most important law protecting Internet speech, and removing Section 230 will remove speech from the Internet,” he said.

Editor’s note: Facebook and Google are among NPR’s financial supporters.

A trio of Silicon Valley’s biggest names will be in the hot seat on Wednesday for a U.S. Senate hearing focused on a decades-old legal shield that is newly under fire.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai are appearing virtually at 10 a.m. ET in front of the Republican-controlled Senate Commerce Committee to answer questions under oath about whether being insulated from lawsuits has enabled Big Tech’s “bad behavior.”

The tech executives plan to defend Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, a 1996 law that says websites cannot be held legally responsible for what people post, no matter how offensive or damaging.

Section 230 is “a law that provided more protection for online third-party speech than does any country in the world,” wrote Jeff Kosseff in a book about the law entitled the Twenty Six Words that Created the Internet.

Indeed, the law allowed companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to morph into massive operations that permeate almost every aspect of modern life without the fear of crippling lawsuits.

But in recent months, as calls to rein in Big Tech grow louder, Section 230 has become a convenient punching bag for Democrats and Republicans, with lawmakers from both parties advocating for the law to be overhauled or repealed.

What do the CEOs plan to say?

In opening remarks from the executives provided to NPR, all three plan to defend Section 230.

Zuckerberg will say that the law made it possible for every major Internet service to be built and ensured that free expression could thrive on platforms.

Section 230 also allows platforms to police content as they see fit. Without that power, removing hate speech and harassment could result in lawsuits, Zuckerberg plans to say.

Still, Facebook supports modernizing the law.

“Changing it is a significant decision. However, I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue about how we might update the law to deal with the problems we face today,” Zuckerberg is expected to say.

Twitter’s Dorsey intends to back that up, emphasizing how undermining the law would dramatically reshape the online world for the worse.

“Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the Internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies,” Dorsey is set to testify.

Pichai of Google plans to offer a word of caution to Washington lawmakers.

“As you think about how to shape policy in this important area,” Pichai expects to say. “I would urge the Committee to be very thoughtful about any changes to Section 230 and to be very aware of the consequences those changes might have on businesses and consumers.”

Repealing Section 230 would have widespread ripple effects. Product comments on Amazon, restaurant reviews on Yelp, entries on Wikipedia and discussions on Reddit are all examples of content that could be impacted by a major overhaul of the law.

How did we get here?

In a sense, because of one of President Trump’s tweets.

Back in May, Trump tweeted a false claim about mail-in voting, and for the first time, Twitter placed a label on it telling people they should get the facts elsewhere.

The move angered Trump, who began beating the drum for Section 230’s repeal. Weeks after Twitter’s action, the president signed a largely symbolic executive order aimed at tech companies’ “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alert virtually any form of communication between private citizens.”

But Trump and his Republican allies have not been alone in railing against Section 230. Democrats in Congress have also sharply criticized the law. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says it would be “revoked immediately.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued earlier this month for a “paring back the sweeping immunity” Section 230 provides to tech companies.

In a reversal of its previous position, the Federal Communications Commission’s Trump-appointed chairman last week announced an effort to “clarify the scope” of the law, something critics said exceeds the power of the commission.

Critics of the president questioned the timing of the new scrutiny on the law just days before the election.

“The timing is conspicuous and troubling,” said Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman in an interview. “It seems designed to appeal to Trump’s core voters to give the impression that there’s a problem with Big Tech and Trump is fixing it.”

Republicans expected to re-up ‘conservative bias’ complaints

If history is any guide, Republicans will use Wednesday as an opportunity to confront the tech CEOs about the notion that Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservatives, as they did in July, when tech executives were supposed to sit for questions about the market power of the companies.

Recently, Republicans pointed to Facebook and Twitter’s decision to suppress links on the platforms to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. The article was underpinned by shaky sourcing that raised red flags among seasoned investigative reporters.

Any time a platform places a warning label or removes content favorable for conservatives, Republicans reupp grievances that social media companies are driven by an anti-conservative agenda.

Yet rigorous research has demonstrated that social media provides a megaphone for conservative stories and voices, sometimes even helping fringe right-wing views reach many millions of people.

Steven Johnson, a data scientist at the University of Virginia, recently finished a study looking at how nearly 200,000 people used social media over four years.

When asked if there is any proof that conservative content is being systematically suppressed on Facebook, by far the largest social network, Johnson was quick to respond.

“Quite the opposite,” he said. “Our research findings are consistent with the Facebook algorithms prioritizing conservative content, at least for its most conservative users.”

Johnson found that the more time people spend on Facebook, the more polarized their online news coverage becomes. For conservatives, however, the extremeness of the content was far more pronounced.

“For conservatives, the more polarized news consumption is five times more polarizing for conservatives than it is for liberals,” he said. “The algorithms for Facebook are shaping what people see and what they choose to visit,” he said. “Our evidence is strongly consistent with the Facebook algorithm having been designed to encourage this.”

Reymundo Torres is an Arizonian, a devout Roman Catholic, ethnically Mexican and a staunch supporter of this president.

“The thing that initially attracted me and keeps me tied to him is that he has taught Republicans how to not just win, but no longer throw our faces and bodies in front of every punch that the left is willing to throw,” Torres said.

Torres likes the way President Trump takes no mess from Democrats or what he calls establishment Republicans. Also, Torres said, it’s refreshing to see a president do what he says he’s going to do despite criticism — from Trump’s fiery tweets, sometimes filled with misinformation — to his controversial decisions such as moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a disputed territory.

Come Election Day top of mind for Torres will be Trump’s remaking of the federal courts. The president has appointed more than 200 judges in his time in office. That, not immigration, is what Torres will be thinking of as he casts his ballot.

“My family’s been in Arizona for more than 100 years. We don’t see ourselves as immigrants,” he said. “We’re very much Arizonans and Americans. So to continue to treat us as if we’re all still just fresh across the border, which most Republicans and a lot of Democrats would like to think we are — just to easily encapsulate us — is something that is not resounding.”

The Latino vote will be key across the country and especially in tight races in places such as Arizona and Florida. This year, Latinos make up the largest non-white eligible voting bloc in the country, and according to polls Torres is a part of about or over a quarter of Latinos who view this president favorably, with some polls showing Trump doing slightly better among Latinos in 2020 than he did with Latinos in 2016.

And the backbone of that support comes from men. A New York Times/Sienna College poll found that former Vice President Joe Biden leads by 34 percentage points among Latina voters, but with Latino men his lead is just 8 points.

“Hispanic men in particular are a swing vote,” said Michelle Mayorga, a New Mexico-based pollster who worked on polls for Equis Research focused on Latino voters. “They are a vote that we have to go and get.”

In polls by Equis Research in key swing states from Arizona to Nevada, Latino male voters show much more support for Trump than Latina voters.

While Democrats are projected to win the majority of Latino votes overall, the margins are narrower with men.

“Republicans will take a larger margin than maybe they have in the past or enough that it will start to eat into the Democratic margin,” Mayorga said.

It may sound strange. This is a president who has called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, whose been accused of race baiting and whose presidency is haunted with images of migrant children separated from their parents in overcrowded detention centers.

But the support tracks with a Republican Party effort to court Latino voters over decades. Republican strategists turned to Latino communities when they started to see African American voters fleeing the party in the 1950s and 1960s, said Geraldo Cadava, a historian at Northwestern University who wrote a book on Hispanic Republicans.

President Richard Nixon set the tone with politics of patronage and high-level appointments of Latinos, Cadava said. So this year is similar.

“It’s kind of right in line with elections in the past. Ever since Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, Republicans have won somewhere between a quarter and a third of the Latino vote,” said Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. “I would point first to the development over a long period of time of a partisan loyalty to the Republican Party. And Latino Republican voters just identify as Republicans above all else, just like many Americans. There is a kind of tribalism among Latino Republicans, just like there is among many Americans.”

While some might expect that support to wane in communities who’ve been most severely impacted by COVID-19 — losing more jobs and more lives than other demographic groups — Cadava said the Trump campaign’s messaging has been successful on low unemployment for Latinos pre-pandemic, law and order (many Latinos serve in the military, police force and in the border patrol) and other issues important to Latino conservatives.

“It’s been kind of amazing to watch, I mean, in some ways the Latinos for Trump campaign, which started officially in the spring of 2019, has been relentless in recruiting Latino voters,” Cadava said. “They’re actually trying to increase Trump’s Latino support, not just kind of hold it steady or depress the turnout of Democrats. They’re trying to win more Latino votes.”

In Orange County, Randall Avila is counting on Latino voters to turn the county red again by flipping back four congressional seats the party lost in 2018 and holding on to the county seat.

Avila is ethnically Mexican, 30, and the executive director of the Orange County Republican Party.

“I’ve been called every name in the book, from coconut to many other things,” he said.

But that derisive rhetoric doesn’t faze him, he said. This party is where he feels at home.

“Our families and our communities, you know, really took care of each other and took care of ourselves. We weren’t really focused on what is the government going to do for us,” he said. “The independent spirit of our community really drove me to the Republican ideal of making sure that you’re able to provide for yourself and your family, that you have that independence and that liberty to be able to start your own business or work where you wanted to, or go to school where you wanted to go and have those opportunities available.”

His Christian faith also aligned him with the Republican Party on issues such as abortion. And while he said he probably wouldn’t phrase things the way Trump does sometimes, Latino voters like him are attracted to the message of lower taxes and lower costs of living, especially in California.

“I’ve never seen the Republican Party fight this hard to get Latino and African American votes,” he said. “We have a number of Latino candidates, a number of Latino Republicans who are really stepping up and taking center stage. I’m hoping that that can be a better conduit to connecting with Latinos across the country and showing them that the Republican Party, there is a place for you here. This is your home as a voter.”