Congressional hearings on “Big Tech” generally follow a three-step formula.
Step one: Lawmakers require Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to answer questions simply with “yes” or “no”. (Example: “Was the YouTube recommendation algorithm designed to encourage users to stay on the site?”)
Step two: the CEOs mentioned above inevitably say something else, either to inject some legitimate nuance or to avoid obvious and unflattering responses with vague banalities. (Sundar Pichai’s answer to the question above: “Responsibility for content is our number one goal.”)
Step three: legislators point out that they are avoiding the question and make fun of them. (Sample, by Representative Billy Long, from Missouri: “I’m going to ask a yes or no question. Do you know the difference between those two words: ‘yes’ and ‘no’?”)
Later today, my colleague Makena Kelly will publish a summary of “Disinformation Nation”, a marathon that the Chamber of Deputies heard about social media, extremism and disinformation. But, for simplicity’s sake, imagine several hours of this three-step process – and that Jack Dorsey is clearly, obviously tired of it all.
While Pichai and Zuckerberg were mostly limited to answering questions, Dorsey started tweeting openly during the hearing – favoring other people’s comments, send passive-aggressive quote tweets wishing the questions were better and tormenting Congress with a Twitter poll.
Jack Dorsey, for what it’s worth, answered “yes” to Long’s question. And on Twitter, “yes” is winning by a margin of 65.5% to 34.5% – but depending on how much longer this audience lasts, there is a lot of time for that to change.