As Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered the hearing room, parents holding photos of their dead children audibly hissed.
Zuckerberg and Meta have faced intense criticism over the years around child safety issues. In the audience are some parents who say that Instagram contributed to their childrens' suicide or exploitation.
Hearing room waiting for tech CEOs full of parents and advocates
The hearing room where Senators will grill the CEOs is full of child safety advocates and parents who say their children were killed or affected in part by social media platforms.
Many parents brought photos of their children to hold as the senators question the CEOs, and many are wearing blue ribbons saying "STOP Online Harms! Pass KOSA!" KOSA is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would create a duty of care for social media companies.
Companies have been reluctant to endorse such legislation. This month, SNAP was the first platform to suggest that it was open to the passage of KOSA. In her opening remarks, X CEO Linda Yaccarino will offer support for the bill among others.
According to a source close to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a large amount of seats allocated to Senate officers were given to parents.
Other seats not reserved for members of the public were reserved for child safety advocates, who have worked for years to address child safety issues at social media companies.
Where’s YouTube? It’s a huge part of where kids spend time online
The video platform is noticeably absent from today’s hearing, although it is a popular destination for kids online.
YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet (which also owns Google), previously came under fire after users found disturbing videos featuring children and comments from child predators under minors’ posts. Advertisers pulled out of the platform after they found their ads alongside inappropriate content. As a result, the company disabled comments on videos with kids and launched a “classifier” to monitor comments for predatory behavior in 2019.
YouTube hasn’t had any high-profile issues with child safety since they cracked down on these commenters. The company's dedicated family-friendly site YouTube Kids has been deemed "mostly safe" by children's media nonprofit Common Sense.
YouTube's policy prohibits content that could potentially endanger children, including videos that sexualize minors, encourage cyberbullying or promote dangerous activities. It also age-restricts videos that feature sexual themes, profanity or harmful acts that kids might imitate.
I think the most talked about “who is not here” from my POV has been Apple.
It will be interesting if Meta and others try to shift more of the focus to “platform players” like Apple iOS and Google Android regarding age-verification.
Another thought on who else could have been here: Amazon’s Twitch. The platform has been called out before for child-grooming-and-exploitation problems in the past. And it’s a huge platform that’s very popular with kids.
The CEOs of Discord, Snap, X and TikTok have made their way into the hearing room.
Reporters lob questions, but none are answered.
Installation mocks "Big Tech"
An installation criticizing “Big Tech” depicts Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, outside the Capitol today.
Even Elmo is feeling the social media strain
Thousands of people have been unloading their life problems on Elmo this week after the red Muppet posed a casual question on X: “How is everybody doing?”
Not well, it seems.
In fact, the question, which was posted to X on Monday, opened the floodgates to a deluge of internet users eager to vent to the children’s show character that had somehow signed himself up to be the internet’s newest therapist.
“Elmo I’m suffering from existential dread over here,” a user replied.
Kids’ online safety takes center stage at Senate tech hearing
There are many proposed bills in the Senate aimed at protecting children on social media sites. Durbin says he sees bipartisan support for a lot of the ideas.
“To think this diverse Senate Judiciary Committee, would have a unanimous vote — every Democrat and every Republican supporting these five or six bills — tells you that we can come together on something that is so compelling,” he said.
He also says this is personal for him. He knows there will be many families in the room today who’ve lost children after being harmed on social media.
“Every time I see these families that have gone through this, I put myself in their shoes and say 'OK, as a father, as a grandfather what would you think if your grandson or granddaughter just gave up their life because of the irresponsibility and danger of these media platforms?' I mean it’s personal.”
What to expect at today's hearing
Senators are expected to grill executives of TikTok, Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook), Discord, X (formerly Twitter) and Snap about what efforts they have made to help stop the exploitation of kids online.
Efforts to regulate social media continue to ramp up across the U.S. amid concerns from some parents that the platforms don’t do enough to keep their kids safe online.
Many of the platforms have said they don’t tolerate child sexual exploitation on their platforms, and they point to various tools they already offer as examples of their proactive methods.
“The bottom line is that we will never have what we want in this lifetime: our daughter back. So we’re here advocating for change,” said Tony Roberts, whose daughter died by suicide after, her parents say, she viewed a simulated hanging video on social media.
Internal Meta emails that Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., acquired will be used in questioning to drive home their argument that Meta has not done all it can to help keep kids safe on their platform.
In November, a Meta whistleblower alleged the company had failed to protect teens.