We didn’t get everything right, Twitter chief tells MPs following Capitol riots

Twitter failed to move fast and aggressive enough to tackle conspiracy theories before the US Captiol riots, a senior executive for the social network has told MPs.

Nick Pickles, the firm’s global head of public policy strategy and development, said it is impossible for any of the tech giants not to look at the events of January 6, which resulted in five deaths, and ask whether they played a part in it.

“This has been a deeply troubling and shocking time for everyone certainly who works at Twitter and I’m not going to tell you that we’ve got everything right – the honest answer is, we haven’t,” he explained to the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Twitter was grilled alongside senior figures from TikTok, Snapchat, Google and Facebook amid mounting pressure over their rules on hate speech and misinformation.

Mr Pickles told MPs that Twitter should have taken a more aggressive approach against conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which claims Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against “deep-state enemies” and a cabal of child sex traffickers, instead of de-amplifying it.

“This year we changed our approach and aggressively removed 70,000 accounts related to that. Now, I think if we were to reflect on our actions should we have taken more aggressive enforcement action earlier? I think we have to say yes.

“And so, I think that the challenge right now is to look at our services and say, look, are the policies that we have now the ones we have in 2016? They’re not – we’ve strengthened them significantly.

“Have we enforced them rigorously and consistently enough? Again I think we have to say we’ve got more work to do to enforce our policies consistently.

“And then ultimately are we willing to take the hard decisions when needed, I think looking at our actions around the Capitol riots and ultimately suspending the personal account of the President of the United States was an unprecedented moment, but it was also a reflection of our services role in offline events.

“We saw how those tweets were being interpreted and we took that decision to remove that account.

“So we definitely have more to do and more to learn but I also think we have made progress since 2016 but I think the way that the media ecosystem as a whole works, you know people may not be able to tweet, but they can go to other platforms they can go to TV stations.”

Facebook defended its record on the matter, saying it has “worked around the clock” to track down content that could incite violence which it describes as “militarised social movements”.

“These are groups of citizens who might use militia-style language or encourage people to bring weapons to events,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, said.

“We are looking for that content and we have, since we put that policy in place this summer, now removed 890 such movements which has led to a corresponding removal of 30,000 pages, groups and events.

“In the run up to the inauguration today, we actually removed any events trying to coordinate people getting together in DC or in other state capitals, which is really quite sweeping if you think about it, I mean, a number of those events might be people who are organising for completely peaceful reasons.

“But out of an abundance of caution we’ve taken this unprecedented step to ensure that our services are not used or abused, attempted to be used for bad purposes.”