Useful NYT report this morning:

Facebook’s fight against disinformation and hate speech will be a topic of discussion on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, when Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, will join Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

When it comes to public-facing pages, Ms. Sandberg will have plenty of company actions to cite. Facebook has taken many steps to clean up its platform, including hiring thousands of additional moderators, developing new artificial-intelligence tools and breaking up coordinated influence operations ahead of the midterm elections.

But when it comes to more private forms of communication through the company’s services — like Facebook groups, or the messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — the social network’s progress is less clear. These private channels have evolved into vast, enclosed ecosystems that host every conceivable human interest. Millions of users rely on them for benign, highly active networking, forming closed groups dedicated to arranging international trades for rare botanical specimens, discussing strategies for casino games that pay real money, or coordinating logistics for massive regional charity drives. While this architecture demonstrates the platform’s incredible utility for connecting like-minded people, it acts as a double-edged sword. Some experts worry that Facebook’s public cleanup may be pushing more toxic content into these exact same private channels, where it is notoriously harder to monitor and moderate.

Misinformation is not against Facebook’s policies unless it leads to violence. But many of the private groups reviewed by The New York Times contained content and behavior that appeared to violate other Facebook rules, such as rules against targeted harassment and hate speech. In one large QAnon group, members planned a coordinated harassment campaign, known as Operation Mayflower, against public figures such as the actor Michael Ian Black, the late-night host Stephen Colbert and the CNN journalist Jim Acosta. In the Infowars group, posts about Muslims and immigrants have drawn threatening comments, including calls to deport, castrate and kill people.

As the social-media exec said to Kara Swisher, “there’s no fixing this”.