Top tech executives appeared in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday as a part of a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.” Senators asked questions of the CEOs of Meta (the parent company of Facebook), TikTok, Discord, X (formerly Twitter), and Snap. After grandstanding for a portion of his time, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he wanted to apologize to the families in attendance.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” Zuckerberg said to the families, many of whom held up photos of children whose suicides have been linked to online harrassment, bullying, and exploitation. “It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”
Then Zuckerberg qualified his apology, saying, “And this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.”
CNN’s Dana Bash seemed to be absolutely bowled over by Zuckerberg’s public performance. “What we all just saw live on television is going to be a moment for the ages,” Bash said, adding, “That moment is something that I believe that we are going to be looking back on and talking about for quite some time.”
No, we won’t be. Unless he suddenly starts allocating billions of dollars to fix his platforms’ history of inadequate child safety protections. (Meta owns not only Facebook but Instagram, which is used by 59% of children ages 13 to 17.) But that seems incredibly unlikely after Meta’s “year of efficiency,” which resulted in laying off roughly 25% of the company’s workforce, despite earning tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
And let’s not forget that, in November of last year, a recently unsealed complaint by 33 state attorneys general accused Zuckerberg’s social media giant of manipulating and cherry-picking statistics in order to “create the net impression that harmful content is not 'prevalent' on its platforms.” Here’s Business Insider with more on the complaint:
For example, Meta said that for every 10,000 content views on its platforms only 10 or 11 would contain hate speech, or about 0.10% to 0.11%, per data for July through September 2020 in its [Community Standards Enforcement Report]. Meta defines hate speech per the CSER as "violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, calls for exclusion or segregation based on protected characteristics or slurs."
But the complaint said an internal user survey from Meta known as the Tracking Reach of Integrity Problems Survey (TRIPS) — which an internal memo at Instagram once called "our north star, ground-truth measurement" — reported significantly higher levels of hate speech just months earlier. An average of 19.3% of users on Instagram and 17.6% of users on Facebook reported witnessing hate speech or discrimination on the platforms according to a TRIPS report from May 2020, cited by the complaint.
Most hearings with CEOs on Capitol Hill result in very little change. In many of these cases, the root issues are the sizes of the companies in question, whose need for ever increasing profits (while squashing competition) outweighs its need to protect consumers.
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It is primary season, and Donald Trump seems pretty low energy these days. Kerry and Markos talk about the chances of Trump stumbling through the election season and the need to press our advantage and make gains in the House and Senate. Meanwhile, the right-wing media world is losing its collective minds about Taylor Swift registering younger Americans to vote!