Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) points out that social media hearings have been happening for years with little progress. He raises the question of whether tech companies have a “secret sauce” that would let them “secure their platforms” and says companies should take regulation more seriously — “we could regulate you out of business” otherwise, he warns.
The Senate has paused before its second big round of questioners, so the CEOs get a few minutes’ rest — and so do we.
The partially redacted messages were posted on Sen. Blumenthal’s site this morning, and you can check them out in PDF form here. The emails, from 2021, show Mark Zuckerberg turning down some proposals to spend more on child safety — they’re being cited as examples that Meta isn’t committed to fixing problems with child exploitation.
Taking the temperature of the hearing, the big theme is that users need to be able to sue tech companies when they screw up, not any specific changes tech companies should be required to make.
On one hand it’s a theme tailored to the audience, which is full of frustrated parents who want direct action. On the other, it doesn’t directly address how to tackle any of the underlying problems, beyond assuming that the companies will be quickly solve them if they’re motivated.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) asked if any of the CEOs supported the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which was reintroduced last year — here’s a quick rundown of the bill. As Coons noted, nobody jumped up to say yes.
So far, individual companies support individual bills, like Snap’s support for KOSA — but across the board, most of the witnesses are saying they want more discussion.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) brings up the fact that Chew’s company is owned by ByteDance and asks what happened to older American data collected prior to TikTok walling it off from China. Chew says TikTok has “never provided” any data to the Chinese government and is in the process of verifying all the data was deleted from non-US storage.
Lindsey Graham is going hard on rolling back Section 230, repeating over and over that tech companies “can’t be sued.” (They can, just not for the sole reason that somebody posted illegal third-party content.) He’s pushing particularly hard on Jason Citron today, urging him to support bills like the EARN IT Act — Citron declines to do so.
She started her opening speech, then restarted after the committee asked if her mic was on. Now she’s doing the opposite of Citron: telling us virtually no teens are on X. “Less than 1 percent of X’s users are between 13 and 17,” she says.
This unfortunately doesn’t mean there’s not child abuse material being posted there — so Yaccarino is focusing on efforts to take that down, saying X suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating the policies in 2023, up from 2.3 million accounts removed in 2022 under Twitter’s old ownership.
Most of the speeches so far have focused on broad commitments to protecting kids, but Shou Zi Chew is just straight-up listing all the features TikTok uses for safety. As previously reported, Chew also says TikTok plans to invest $2 billion in trust and safety this year, much of it in the US specifically.
Every company here is facing a unique situation, and Snap’s involves its disappearing messages feature, which has come under fire in court. Snap also recently came out in favor of KOSA. Evan Spiegel’s speech promises Snap will “be part of the solution” to online safety.