Today, Congress investigates whether social media hates conservatives

This morning, the House Judiciary Committee will hear arguments about whether Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other big tech companies are discriminating against conservatives. In some ways, it’s a smaller version of the marathon Facebook hearings earlier this month — but instead of focusing on broad questions about web platforms’ social responsibilities, it’s pulling a specific politically charged thread from those hearings. It’s also yet another way to bring up Diamond and Silk in Congress.

Here’s the background of the hearing, which starts at 10AM.

According to the title, the panel will examine “social media filtering practices and their effect on free speech.” More specifically, it will “focus on what metrics social media platforms use to moderate content, how filtering decisions are made, and whether viewpoints have been silenced on some of the most popular and widely used platforms.”

Whether Facebook, Twitter, and Google have intentionally censored conservative users due to liberal Silicon Valley leanings.

Apparently fewer people than the organizers hoped. The hearing was supposed to be divided into three panels: one featuring Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN); a second featuring representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter; and a third featuring members of the EFF and News Media Alliance — as well as vloggers Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known as Diamond and Silk.

But since the original announcement, the EFF has told Axios that it’s dropping out of the panel, saying that “the hearing we thought they were having kind of changed a lot” and “didn’t look like it was digging into substance.” On the other hand, think tank TechFreedom’s president Berin Szóka has announced that he’s testifying at the hearing, and has posted written testimony online.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were listed as invited rather than confirmed, and Facebook officially declined its invitation yesterday, saying it would carry out “a continuing dialogue with members of the committee” outside the hearing. Twitter and Google have not officially responded either way.

Practically speaking, this hearing could end up being largely a soapbox for Blackburn, Hardaway, and Richardson, all of whom have complained of being censored by social networks.

It depends on the definition of censorship. Last year, Twitter banned Blackburn from promoting a video ad where she bragged about stopping “the sale of baby body parts,” on the grounds that it violated rules against “inflammatory” advertising. Twitter recanted the decision a day later, saying it had reconsidered the statement in the context of her larger ad and decided to allow it. It also never tried to stop Blackburn from posting the video as a non-promoted tweet.

More recently, Diamond and Silk — who make videos about their staunch support for Donald Trump — claimed that Facebook was limiting the reach of their account because of their political opinions. This is a tricky claim to prove, and Facebook told ThinkProgress that any performance changes were due to larger shifts in Facebook’s algorithms, something ThinkProgress backed up with an investigation. However, the company also acknowledged sending and then retracting an “inaccurate” email, which said that “the Policy team has came to the conclusion that [Diamond and Silk’s] content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.”

Conservative lawmakers cited Diamond and Silk and this comment several times during last week’s Facebook hearings, at points apparently flustering Mark Zuckerberg.

Once again, it’s extremely complicated. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have all faced cases where they censured or suspended a conservative user and ended up walking back the decision after criticism. At one point, YouTube said its moderators may have mistakenly flagged a number of accounts that included conservative figures like Alex Jones — who has trafficked in “crisis actor” conspiracy theories that YouTube has tried to crack down on. And some platform decisions might also be seen as inherently anti-conservative, like bans on videos about guns.

But platform moderation is often just terrible in general, regardless of ideology. LGBT YouTube users, for instance, have also complained about their videos being unfairly restricted. So it’s hard to say whether these companies are disproportionately singling out conservative political groups, or whether those groups are just more likely to interpret mistakes as evidence of a coordinated campaign against them.

Censorship is a fuzzy term, too. In a lot of these cases, including Diamond and Silk’s, platforms aren’t suspending any accounts or removing any posts. They’re putting users’ content behind an age verification screen, removing the ability to run ads against it, or refusing to promote it. It’s harder for these users to spread their message or make money, but they’re not being outright silenced in the way that “censorship” often implies.

The exception is genocidally racist far-right political movements, including Atomwaffen, a white supremacist group that’s linked to multiple murders. But defending neo-Nazis as part of the conservative movement is not a great look.

It’s theoretically possible. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have suggested that only “neutral platforms” are protected from legal liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This is a very bad reading of Section 230, but lawmakers also just dealt a blow to the rule with the FOSTA-SESTA amendment, and if they feel strongly enough about enforcing political neutrality, they could attempt to change it again.

FCC chair Ajit Pai previously complained about “discrimination” against conservatives while arguing against net neutrality, so we could see that agency revisit the issue at some point as well.

But as the EFF said, this hearing doesn’t seem like it’s going to hash out serious policy issues. It’s a platform for conservative lawmakers to talk about a controversial issue that’s extremely difficult to actually examine, but very easy to rally around.