As the COVID-19 pandemic settled into what will undoubtedly be its most deadly phase yet on Tuesday, with hospitals shedding staff and collapsing under the strain of an influx of nearly a million new patients this week alone, crushing and overwhelming the limited medical capacity of several states, your tax dollars were hard at work.
The Senate Judiciary Committee concluded its hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, after more than four hours and 127 questions on Tuesday.
Senate Republicans who control the Judiciary Committee, in particular, demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the most critical issues facing the American population right now.
Republicans asked 72 questions of the chief executives, 53 of which concerned how they moderate content on their social media platforms. Republican senators were particularly focused on how Twitter and Facebook could employ less moderation, with 37 questions about censoring conservative voices and the ideological makeup of their work forces.
In fact, the four hours that comprised today’s hearing alone exceeded the number of hours Senate Republicans have collectively spent over the last eight months in addressing relief for Americans and their families, whose lives have been upended by the economic fallout of the worst pandemic to strike this country in over a century. While 54 million Americans literally struggle to maintain food on the table, week to week, with cars lined up at food banks as far as the eye can see, the focus of this critical hearing was an ideological preening session calculated to demonize those dastardly Silicon Valley titans over their distribution of political memes and conservative fever dreams during the last election cycle.
In particular, Republican senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas focused on the unproven idea that Facebook and Twitter unduly moderated posts by conservatives, compared with the amount of time spent labeling or taking down posts made by liberals.
That has been a recurring refrain from conservative Americans over the past few weeks as scores of people have claimed they will leave Facebook and Twitter for more permissive platforms like Parler, Rumble and MeWe. Facebook and Twitter have maintained that political affiliation has no bearing on how they enforce their rules.
God forbid, don’t get me wrong. Whether or not my Aunt Betty can trust that the content of the political memes she shares, along with her family photos and inspirational religious-based paeans to soothe her Christian sensibilities, isn’t being arbitrarily curtailed by faceless, atheistic 20-somethings in open-concept San Jose offices matters; whether some tiny sidebar ad portraying Joe Biden as a puppet of the Chinese government, or an ad portraying Donald Trump as a heroic defender of liberty (with a donation button prominently featured) is not insignificant; and whether an inflammatory tweet by some congressional nitwit gets a tiny and pitifully unnoticed disclaimer—these are all super important issues.
But you know, to paraphrase Billy Joel, there’s some place that these Senators should rather be.
Instead, it's fantasyland on Capitol Hill. We had Ted Cruz whining about Twitter’s fact-check of the ridiculous Hunter Biden concoction that the right-wing invented to smear Joe Biden.
"In any world, handling control of our democracy, handling control of free speech to a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires—modern day oligarchs with unlimited power and a brazen willingness to use that power—would pose profound dangers," he added.
Apparently a virulent, monolithic conservative news network run by a foreign-born businessman named Rupert Murdoch doesn’t deserve any attention at all. But I digress.
In the context of what is occurring right now, all across America, this kind of cheap, pandering political theater is not only pointless, it’s a disgrace.
These people have the power, should they ever choose to exercise it, to provide desperately needed relief to Americans of all political stripes who are currently saddled with a public health and economic crisis like none that has existed in anyone’s living memory. And what are they doing? Whining about social media.
This is what their priorities have become.