• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2020

The Senate Commerce Committee will vote Thursday on whether or not to authorize a series of subpoenas, calling on Facebook, Google and Twitter CEOs to attend a hearing.

The hearing is being held by U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Those asked to attend include Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

A live video of the markup and additional information will be available online.

Last week, the committee made public its plans to subpoena the three executives if they didn't respond to invitations it issued for them to testify on potential changes to the companies' Section 230 liability protection.

As defined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Section 230 protects a blog host from liability for ‘any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable,  whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.’”