Rep. Adam Schiff Sends Letter To Big Tech CEOs Demanding They Tackle 'Misinformation And Disinformation' During 2024 Election

On Sunday, several prominent Democratic congressmen, including Reps. Adam Schiff (R-CA) and Dan Goldman (D-NY) demanded answers on how several of America's biggest social media giants were working to ensure that "misinformation and disinformation" weren't being spread online in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

The letter, sent to the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Google, Snapchat, and Microsoft, demanded information about the various policies in place to prevent misinformation about the general election and whether they would share their results and data with Congress.

"We write to your platforms as concerned Member of Congress, seeking further information about your preparation for and response to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, or the potential incitement of violence on your platforms leading up to the 2024 elections," Reps. Adam Schiff, Dan Goldman, Julia Brownley (D-CA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Doris Matsui (D-CA), and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) wrote. "We have already seen how posts with disinformation have spread on the major social media platforms both in the United States and across the globe during election cycles."

The Democratic members of Congress demanded that the Big Tech CEOs provide written answers about how they will be changing their "election integrity policies" to prepare for the 2024 election, how they will ensure transparency in their guideline enforcement, how they will deal with misinformation from political figures, and whether the companies will commit to keeping these policies in place indefinitely.

The letter comes after years of the White House pressuring Big Tech companies like Facebook to censor the speech of millions of Americans. As previously reported by the DC Enquirer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the White House "pressured" his company to censor COVID-19 content on social media.

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," Zuckerberg explained. "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."

During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday evening, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) highlighted the danger of this government-led censorship campaign and the threat it poses to democracy. "We do actually have a threat to democracy in this country -- It is the threat of censorship," Vance said. "It is Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics. It's big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens, and Kamala Harris is saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she would like to censor people who engage in misinformation."

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