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It’s been 20 years since Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched a program called Thefacebook for his college community, launching a company that would capture more than 3 billion users, flirt with a trillion-dollar valuation, and make so much money that now return a dividend to the shareholders. And what better way to celebrate than to raise your hand at a Congressional hearing like a mob boss or tobacco executive? “You have blood on your hands,” Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Zuckerberg this week. “You have a product that is killing people.” Applause erupted from the gallery behind him, including families who believe his creation helped kill their children.
The hearing, called Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis, was a reminder to Zuckerberg that after 20 years, his company is still, despite its enthusiasm for creating metaverses and artificial general intelligence, at heart a social network. There is an urgent need to address how his platform and others affect child safety and well-being, something Congress has criticized for years. The Judiciary Committee has crafted several bills to force companies to do better, including some that require better content policing and make it easier to enact civil and criminal penalties for social media companies. In addition to Zuckerberg, this week’s hearing featured Discord’s Jason Citron, Linda Yaccarino from X, Snap’s Evan Spiegel and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, in theory to solicit testimony that could move those bills forward. But the audience focused less on listening to the executives than on flogging them for their sins. As Graham said, “If we wait for these guys to solve the problem, we’ll die waiting.”
In fact, lawmakers should stop wasting their time on these evasive tycoons and should simply pass the laws they believe will save young lives. Instead, they complained repeatedly during the hearing that they cannot do their jobs because “armies of lawyers and lobbyists” stand in their way. Funny, I don’t remember lobbyists being a required part of the process in my high school textbook. How a law is passed. Still, senator after senator complained about colleagues in Congress who passively blocked the bills, implying that they valued support from tech companies more than preventing teenagers from committing suicide. At one point, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy asked Majority Leader Charles Schumer to “go to Amazon, buy a tenderloin online, and bring this bill to the Senate floor.” Maybe the next hearing should have Chuck himself under the bright lights. I can imagine it now: Senator Schumer, It’s true That one of your daughters works as a lobbyist for Amazon and another has been working for Meta for years? Yes or no!
Well, let’s stipulate that, as the senators see it, the US Congress does not have the stones to pass legislation on child safety on social media unless the companies suspend their dogs. That would mean that the Senate has to work with forcing companies (or their armies of lobbyists) to find compromises. But the committee spent little effort finding common ground with the companies. More than one senator thought it would be constructive to force each CEO to say whether he supported this or that bill as written. Almost universally, CEOs tried to say that there were things in the bill they agreed with, but others they opposed and needed to work with lawmakers on. They were barely able to get a sentence out before they were cut off, as Graham did during his interrogation of Discord’s Citron. “That’s a no,” he said, without giving her a chance to say what was needed to make it a yes. The Dirksen Office Building saw a lot of that kind of bombast this week.
A key tension between Congress and the tech industry is the status of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which holds users responsible for content on platforms, not the companies that run them. Nearly two hours into the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse finally asked the executives what modifications to Section 230 would be acceptable to them. But he apparently didn’t want that discussion to take time away from the main event (posturing, chest-beating, and ritual humiliation) and asked them to submit their thoughts in writing after the hearing. He would have preferred a genuine discussion at that point. Is it possible to reform Section 230 to hold social media companies accountable for negligence or actual wrongdoing, without putting them out of business and shutting down sectors of the Internet? What are the implications of freedom of expression? How does this relate to some state laws, now under consideration by the Supreme CourtForcing platforms to show certain content even if they feel it violates their standards? Believe it or not, fruitful dialogue is possible at a Congressional hearing. We had one recently about AI where witnesses and senators really delved into the issues, without accusations that the witnesses were killing people. Although AI could kill us all!
One possible solution to the social media problem mentioned by several senators was to allow platforms that poorly moderate content to be sued. That would be all of them, according to Whitehouse, who told CEOs: “Your platforms really suck at policing themselves.” (Isn’t that phrase itself toxic content?) Families who have filed these types of lawsuits have had a difficult time moving forward because Section 230 appears to grant immunity to the platforms. It seems fair to modify the rule so that if a company, knowingly or through obvious negligence, refuses to remove harmful posts, it should be responsible for the consequences of its own actions. But that could unleash a tsunami of lawsuits based on both frivolous and serious claims. For Republican lawmakers in particular, this is an interesting approach, since their party’s votes drove the passage of a 1995 law that made opposite for an industry whose products cause many more deaths than social networks. Law on Protection of Legal Trade in Arms prohibited victims of gun violence from suing ammunition manufacturers. I’d like to hear lawmakers grapple with that paradox, but I don’t think I’d get an answer without subpoena power.
