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.
His opening testimony emphasizes that “the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” (Which isn’t necessarily wrong, partly because causal links are very hard to prove — the overall body of research is complicated and seems to suggest social media has a variety of possible effects.)
Citron would like you to know he’s a gamer — “games have always brought us together, and Discord makes that happen today.” He acknowledges that more than 60 percent of active users are between the ages of 13 and 24, so child safety takes on particular relevance here. He’s also trying to distinguish himself from the rest of the “Big Tech” crowd, highlighting Discord’s relatively small size and lack of mega-acquisitions.
Graham is pledging to push through a variety of online regulation bills, including the EARN IT Act that’s been stalled in Congress for several years. He’s putting particular attention on rolling back Section 230, which protects tech companies from liability for third-party content.
Durbin has passed things off to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who’s thanking the families who have brought pictures of their children. Graham and Durbin are mostly hitting the same beats — emphasizing the bipartisan agreement here — but Graham is going a little further, telling Mark Zuckerberg that “you have blood on your hands.” The line got applause from the crowd.