Discord CEO Jason Citron said in his opening statements that encryption on his platform would disrupt the platform's child safety efforts.
The statement touches a hot-button issue in the tech community, balancing privacy via technologies like end-to-end encryption and the ability to assist law enforcement and do its own proactive scanning.
In 2023, Meta rolled out end-to-end encryption on Messenger, causing controversy among child safety advocates.
SNAP CEO Evan Spiegel plans to announce that SNAP will not further roll out encryption on its platform in ways that would disrupt scanning its platforms for child sexual abuse material.
Discord CEO says platform is about having fun with friends
In his opening remarks, Discord CEO Jason Citron shared how video games enriched his life as a kid, and how his platform aims to do that for other gamers.
"I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 years old. And as a kid, it’s how I had fun and found friendship," he said. "We built Discord so that anyone could build friendships playing video games from Minecraft to Wordle and everything in between."
As a father of two, he said he wants Discord to be a platform his own kids "use and love, and I want them to be safe."
He emphasized that the platform has a "zero tolerance policy on child sexual abuse material."
CEOs are sworn in. Here come the opening statements.
AI gets its first mention from Graham
Graham says "AI is just starting." It's the first of what will likely be many mentions of AI today.
AI has been a huge topic of concern lately, from AI-generated news spreading misinformation among young people on YouTube to sexually explicit deepfakes of celebrities like Taylor Swift gaining traction on X.
Sexually explicit AI has gotten so serious that a bipartisan effort is underway in the Senate to give victims the ability to sue makers of such AI-generated images.
Yesterday, a group of senators introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (also known as the DEFIANCE Act), which aims to give those victims a form of recourse.
What is Section 230?
The lawmakers have already brought up Section 230 a lot this morning. So what is it?
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields tech companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms by third parties. It has come under scrutiny from lawmakers in recent years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for changes to Section 230 in March 2021.
“Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it,” Zuckerberg said in his opening remarks, according to written testimony released on the House Committee website at the time.
In his opening remarks, Sen. Graham emphasized "it is now time to repeal section 230."
Graham: 'Mr. Zuckerberg ... you have blood on your hands'
In his opening statement, Graham called out several CEOs by name.
"Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so but you have blood on your hands," Graham said to applause in the room. "You have a product that’s killing people."
Graham acknowledged that he uses Meta products, adding that social media companies need to deal with the issues they've unleashed.
In his opening statement, Ranking Member Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said that "while Washington is certainly broken, there is a ray of hope" in bipartisan support for increased child safety regulation for social media sites.
Graham later jokes about how even he and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., agree.
"Now, Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham have almost nothing in common I promised her I would say that publicly," he said.
But the two both "see an abuse here that needs to be dealt with."
Durbin jabbed at tech platforms' last minute changes around child safety ahead of Wednesday's hearing, jokingly calling the changes coincidental.
The line in Durbin's opening remarks yielded chuckles from audience members.
Ahead of the hearing, numerous platforms expressed new interest in pieces of legislation and regulation, while previously being slow to adopt such proposed changes.
Durbin said in 2013, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 1,380 cyber tips per day about child sexual abuse material.
A decade later, those tips have skyrocketed to 100,000 reports per day, Durbin said.
Lawmakers began the hearing promptly at 10 a.m. by showing the room a video about young people sharing how they have been impacted by social media exploitation.