The Los Angeles Post

Twitter shares down as much as 6% during CEO Jack Dorsey’s Senate testimony

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Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter Inc., listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018. 

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter Inc., listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018.

Twitter shares were down as much as 6 percent Wednesday during CEO Jack Dorsey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Dorsey is testifying alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about election meddling and abuse on their platforms. Google was also invited to testify, but the tech giant declined to send its CEO or parent company Alphabet’s CEO.

Twitter’s stock fell 1 percent Wednesday before the committee hearing began. Other tech stocks were also down on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans have accused Twitter, Facebook and Google of political bias in recent months, with frustrations intensifying in recent weeks. Trump last week said social platforms are “treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful.”

Twitter's Dorsey: We need to be better at educating our users

Twitter’s Dorsey: We need to be better at educating our users  

Twitter has been repeatedly accused of a practice commonly called “shadow banning,” in which the platform de-emphasizes certain accounts in search results. Republicans have claimed conservative accounts were shadow banned; Twitter has repeatedly denied that claim.

“We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially,” Dorsey said in his prepared testimony. “In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.”

Dorsey went on to say that a data analysis by Twitter, controlling for several factors, found that a single tweet by a Republican member of Congress is viewed as many times as a single tweet by a Democratic member of Congress.