WASHINGTON (AP) — Less than a week before Election Day, the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google are set to face a grilling by Republican senators who accuse the tech giants of anti-conservative bias. Democrats are trying to expand the discussion to include other issues such as the companies’ heavy impact on local news.

The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing today. The executives have agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas.

With the election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views.

The chorus of protest rose this month after Facebook and Twitter acted to limit dissemination of an unverified political story from the conservative-leaning New York Post about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, an unprecedented action against a major media outlet. The story, which was not confirmed by other publications, cited unverified emails from Biden’s son Hunter that were reportedly disclosed by Trump allies.

Social media giants are also under heavy scrutiny for their efforts to police misinformation about the election. Twitter and Facebook have slapped a misinformation label on content from the president, who has around 80 million followers. Trump has raised the prospect, without evidence, of mass fraud in the vote-by-mail process.

Starting Tuesday, Facebook is not accepting any new political advertising. Previously booked political ads will be able to run until the polls close next Tuesday, when all political advertising will temporarily be banned. Google, which owns YouTube, also is halting political ads after the polls close. Twitter banned all political ads last year.

Beyond questioning the CEOs, senators will examine proposals to revise long-held legal protections for online speech, an immunity that critics in both parties say enables the companies to abdicate their responsibility to impartially moderate content.

The tech platforms are gateways to news online. Critics say their dominant position in the advertising market has crushed the struggling U.S. news industry, especially local news publishers.

A report issued Tuesday by the committee’s Democratic staff cited the additional devastating impact of the recession triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. About 7,000 newspaper employees are expected to be laid off this year, and newspaper revenues will be down 70% from two decades ago, according to the report.

“Local news is an incredible engine for the creation of accurate information. We don’t want to lose that infrastructure,” Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, the panel’s top Democrat, said in an interview.

The Democrats’ report accuses the big platforms of unfairly using news content, taking news consumers’ data and diverting customers from local news websites, with little compensation. It proposes that Congress enact rules preventing tech platforms from taking local news content without fair payment.

“These unfair and abusive practices should be called out,” Cantwell said.