Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may get dragged into a series of Big Tech antitrust hearings next week, following a July 15 hack that compromised some of the most prominent accounts on the social media platform.
The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are all set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on July 27. On Wednesday, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee, wrote to the chair Jerrold Nadler asking that Dorsey be added to the line-up.
"We believe there is bipartisan interest to hear from Twitter about its power in the marketplace, its role in moderating content on its platform, and the causes for its recent highly publicized security breaches," Jordan wrote. "As the committee considers large technology companies and the competitive landscape, a thorough examination cannot exclude Twitter, a market leader in social media," he added.
Twitter is far smaller than the companies appearing at the antitrust hearing. Its market cap is $28.8 billion, whereas Facebook — the only other social media company testifying — weighs in at just shy of $684 billion. In Q1 of 2020, Twitter reported an average of 166 million monetizable daily active users, whereas Facebook reported 1.7 billion daily active users at the end of March 2020.
Jordan's request comes after he accused Twitter of anti-conservative bias. On July 8, he asked Twitter to hand over documents about its decision to flag some of President Trump's tweets for breaking the platform's rules on misinformation and the glorification of violence. Jordan said Twitter had shown "discrimination against conservative voices."
Twitter has repeatedly denied that its moderation policies unfairly censor conservative users, and Dorsey testified to Congress on the topic in 2018.
During the recent Twitter security breach, hackers tweeted links to a cryptocurrency scam from prominent celebrity accounts, including those belonging to Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Twitter is still investigating the hack, and on Wednesday said it believes hackers accessed the private direct messages of 36 accounts. It previously said that 130 accounts were affected by the hack.
