Facebook, Google testify to Congress about curbing violent content

Representatives from Facebook and Google testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to detail what they are doing to combat hate on their platforms.

Facebook public policy director Neil Potts said its artificial intelligence technology helped the company take down millions of copies of the New Zealand mosque shooting after it was livestreamed last month.

"We have significant investments in artificial intelligence to try to detect this type of content before it is seen before it is reported so that we can act more swiftly to remove it," he said.

The massacre at Christchurch Mosque and October's deadly shooting at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue inspired the hearing on hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism.

Google's Alexandria Walden outlined the limits of free speech on her company's platforms.

"Hate speech and violent extremism have no place on YouTube," she said.

By the time Walden said those words, YouTube had already shut down the hearing's live chat section due to a flood of racist and anti-Semitic comments—a point not lost on committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, who quoted some of the posts.

"'Anti-hate is a code word for anti-white,' wrote another, et cetera," Nadler said. "So this just illustrates part of the problem we're dealing with."

The hearing also included Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, whose two daughters were killed in an anti-Muslim hate crime. Civil rights advocates and lawyers testified about the rising danger of white nationalism towards racial and religious minorities.

"What we're seeing in the last three years, in particular, is a resurgence where more of the crimes are from right-wing extremists," said Eileen Hershenov, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League.

What the committee intends to do to combat online hate, however, remained unclear by the end of the hearing. One congressman, though, told the Facebook and YouTube representatives to figure it out themselves before Congress does it for them.