Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook (FB), and Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter (TWTR), are testifying today in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is assessing how well social media companies are confronting foreign influence on their platforms. In her opening remarks, Sandberg reiterated that Facebook was too slow to react in 2016 when the platform was used for election interference by Russian accounts. Meanwhile, Dorsey has tweeted that he is not "proud" of the way its platform has been used to spread propaganda and the way "bad faith actors" were able to "game Twitter". 

FACEBOOK 'TOO SLOW' TO REACT: In a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that the social media giant was too slow to respond to foreign efforts to interfere in the U.S. elections. "We were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That is on us", she said. "We're getting better at finding and stopping our opponents".

DORSEY NOT 'PROUD': Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted his opening remarks to a Senate panel on the company's platform as he began issuing the remarks in person. They read in part, "I'm someone of very few words, and typically pretty shy, and I realize how important it is to speak up now. If it's okay with all of you, I'd like to read you something I personally wrote as I considered these issues. I'll also tweet this out now. First, I wanted to step back and share our view of Twitter's role in the world. We believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square...We're extremely proud of helping to increase the accessibility and velocity of a simple, free and open exchange. We believe people will learn faster by being exposed to a wide range of opinions and ideas, and it helps to make our nation, and the world, feel a little bit smaller. We aren't proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people, and our nation. We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we've acknowledged... Our interests are aligned with the American people and this committee. If we don't find scalable solutions to the problems we're now seeing, we lose our business, and we continue to threaten the original privilege and liberty we were given to create Twitter in the first place. We weren't expecting any of this when we created Twitter over 12 years ago...We're identifying and challenging 8-10 million suspicious accounts every week. And we're thwarting over a half million accounts from logging in to Twitter every day. We've learned from 2016 and more recently from other nation's elections how to help protect the integrity of our elections. Better tools, stronger policy, and new partnerships are already in place. We intend to understand the efficacy of these measures to continue to get better. But we all have to think a lot bigger, and decades past today...Required changes won't be fast or easy. Today we're committing to the people, and this committee, to do that work, and do it openly". 

SENATORS BLAST ALPHABET: The Senate Intelligence Committee purposely set up an unoccupied seat for Alphabet (GOOG; GOOGL ) as they wanted either CEO Larry Page or Google chief executive Sundar Pichai to testify alongside Twitter's Dorsey and Facebook's Sandberg, but the company offered its top lawyer and SVP of global affairs Kent Walker. "I'm disappointed Google decided against sending the right senior level executive", Senator Richard Burr said in his opening remarks.

PRICE ACTION: In morning trading, shares of Facebook have slipped over 1% to $169.16, while Twitter's shares have dropped more than 5% to $33.07. Class A shares of Alphabet have also slid almost 2% to $1,189.08.