Unriddled: The Push for Messaging, Hotel Google, and More Tech News You Need

 "Unriddled" is HubSpot's mid-week digest of the tech headlines you need to know. Each week, we highlight the top stories in a quick, scannable way and break it all down. It's tech news: explained.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. Twitter (and Facebook) Takes Washington

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made not one, but two appearances before U.S. lawmakers last week to testify on foreign interference on social media, as well as the company's algorithms and content moderation policies.

Dorsey was joined by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg for the former -- held before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) -- where it was revealed that between October 2017 and March 2018, Facebook deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts -- an eyebrow-raising figure given the company's current metric of "2.23 billion monthly active users on Facebook as of June 30, 2018."

"How can 1.3 billion accounts account for only 3 percent to 4 percent of 2.2 billion users?" asks Siva Vaidhyanathan in a New York Times op-ed, noting the statistics from Facebook's own transparency report. "The answer is that such pages are going up faster than Facebook can swat them down."

Twitter also plans to release a revamped version of its own transparency report, Dorsey said during his latter hearing before the House Energy and Commerce committee -- one that will disclose data on harassment reports and violations taking place on the platform.

The new report "will make that data more public," Dorsey said, "so that all can learn from it and we can be held accountable."

Since the hearings, both platforms have announced new initiatives to combat many of the issues about which Dorsey and Sandberg were questioned by lawmakers. After weeks of various excuses for not doing so, Twitter banned the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform (following in the footsteps of peers Apple and YouTube), and Facebook announced more transparency tools to allow brands to see where their video ads might appear.

Google, meanwhile, was notably absent from the morning's hearing, despite the SSCI's wishes for CEO Sundar Pichai to testify, as well as an invitation extended to parent company Alphabet Inc.'s CEO Larry Page. The day prior to the hearing, a new report from the Campaign for Accountability revealed the ease with which Google's safeguards against spreading misinformation can be manipulated and compromised.

Tony Romm and Craig Timberg of The Washington Post covered the day's