Members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee castigated executives at leading social media companies Wednesday, calling for more to be done to shield children from sexual exploitation, drug dealing, self-harm encouragement and other damaging content.
In one tense exchange, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley demanded to know if Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, had ever apologized to his platforms’ victims — prompting Zuckerberg to turn around and briefly speak to the audience of family members.
Senators of both parties during the four-hour, emotionally charged hearing promoted a raft of bills the committee has unanimously passed that they say would add significant accountability to tech platforms.
And they urged the tech executives — including Zuckerberg of Meta, Shou Chew of TikTok and Linda Yaccarino of X — to work with them on legislation or risk being “regulated out of business.”
Social media users, especially children and teens, are vulnerable to online scams, extortion and other dangerous material, several senators said.
More than 100,000 instances of child sexual abuse material are reported daily, said Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat.
Children and teens are also subject to “sextortion,” where predators trick them into providing compromising material, then demand payments to keep the images from being shown publicly, he said.
The psychological damage from such episodes can lead to suicide, Durbin and other senators noted.
The panel’s ranking Republican, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said he had concluded that, perhaps despite company founders’ initial aims, social media platforms are “dangerous products” that are “destroying lives, threatening democracy itself.”
“You have blood on your hands,” he said in an opening statement, prompting the first of several rounds of applause from an audience filled with family members of victims of online exploitation. “You have a product that’s killing people.”
Big tech defense
The social media executives acknowledged that their platforms could be exploited by bad actors, but said harmful content made up small portions of what appeared on their platforms and noted their companies had teams working to control unsafe material.
The executives declared a responsibility to protect users from dangerous content.
“All of us here on the panel today and throughout the tech industry have a solemn and urgent responsibility to ensure that everyone who uses our platforms is protected from these criminals, both online and off,” Jason Citron, CEO of the video game-focused platform Discord Inc., said.
But the executives were hesitant to commit their support to legislation touted by senators that would expand protections for social media users.
