Bloviating conspiracy theorist Alex Jones whispered loudly in the front row with far-right media personality Jack Posobiec. Banned Twitter troll Chuck Johnson sat a few seats down giggling intermittently at who knows what. A man in a black shirt with the words “FBI used toddler for SEX" printed in red block print meandered in and out of the room.

The internet’s biggest problems quite literally took a front-row seat at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, updated lawmakers on how they're addressing the issues of foreign influence and fake news that have plagued their platforms. Dorsey followed up with a solo session before the House Energy and Commerce Committee a few hours later.

But while many of Wednesday's questions and answers echoed earlier statements by tech executives over the past year, the looming presence of personalities like Jones and Johnson served as a physical reminder of the still pervasive menace of misinformation. Facebook and YouTube may have kicked Jones off their platforms (and tanked his traffic in the process), but they still can't seem to shake the toxicity he propagates and personifies.

'There's no clear and easy path forward.' Senator Richard Burr

Members of Congress mostly ignored the sideshow swirling around the internet trolls in the audience, instead questioning Dorsey and Sandberg on the fine line between allowing free speech and preventing harassment and disinformation campaigns. They pressed the executives on the steps their platforms have taken to identify foreign influence campaigns, and how they respond to requests from foreign countries like Turkey and Russia to suppress speech. In fact, Jones got only a glancing reference in the morning session, when Democratic senator Martin Heinrich asked the panel how they might deal with a US citizen who "says that victims of a mass shooting were actually actors, for example." Jones has famously claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.

The sparse crowd let out a chuckle. But Jones didn't hear it. By then, he and his entourage had abandoned the hearing in favor of pacing the hallways, heckling lawmakers like senator Marco Rubio in front of a phalanx of microphones and cameras. “Who is this guy? I swear to god I don’t know who you are, man,” Rubio told Jones, who stood poking and prodding the senator as he talked to reporters.

If that’s true, Rubio wasn’t particularly well-prepared for the hearing. Jones has been at the white-hot center of a debate over tech companies' responsibility to police not just foreign threats but also outright lies and abusive behavior from domestic actors. Recently, Facebook and YouTube suspended pages and accounts associated with Jones and his InfoWars broadcast. Apple and Spotify removed his podcasts. Twitter has, meanwhile, opted to allow Jones to operate, even while it banned fellow troll Chuck Johnson years ago.

This patchwork of policies has opened the companies up to accusations of censorship, not just by the Jones and Johnson set but by government officials as well. Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee repeatedly accused Dorsey of "shadowbanning" conservatives in the afternoon session, by now a familiar refrain. Separately on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that attorney general Jeff Sessions would meet with state attorneys general to discuss whether tech companies are suppressing free speech.

But the morning hearing, which stood in stark contrast to the circus outside, focused less on partisan bias than on what steps tech companies have taken to stop foreign influence campaigns. Recently, Facebook, Twitter, and Google each suspended hundreds of accounts and pages linked to Iran after receiving a tip from the cybersecurity firm, FireEye, rather than spotting it themselves. "In our mind that’s the system working," Sandberg said.