Senate Judiciary Committee Authorizes Subpoenas for Twitter and Facebook CEOs -- Update

By Siobhan Hughes 

The Senate Judiciary Committee authorized its chairman to issue subpoenas to the chief executives of Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., after the companies limited sharing of New York Post articles regarding the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The Republican-led panel voted 12-0 to authorize Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) to issue subpoenas to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey.

The vote will "hopefully give us some leverage to secure their testimony, " Mr. Graham said.

Democrats sat out the meeting, as they boycotted a separate committee vote to advance Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the full Senate.

Twitter last week blocked users from posting links to the New York Post articles, initially citing a potential violation of its rules regarding hacked materials. The company later said the articles also violated its policies on displaying private information like email addresses and phone numbers without a person's permission. Mr. Dorsey said at the time that the company's failure to give context around its actions was "unacceptable."

Twitter's move came after Facebook also limited the distribution of the articles on its platform, saying it was awaiting guidance from its third-party fact-checking partners. Facebook slowed the spread of the Post articles pending a decision by those partners, a spokesman said last week.

Write to Siobhan Hughes at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 22, 2020 10:22 ET (14:22 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.