Legislators will debate the group’s attempts to safeguard teenagers who use its services.
There will be a hearing about kid safety in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the chief executive officers of five different social media companies are going to be there to speak. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, CEO of Discord Jason Citron, and CEO of X Linda Yaccarino will all be present at the hearing. This event will take place.
Legislators will confront the organisation over their track record regarding the exploitation of children and their attempts to protect adolescents who make use of their services. On Wednesday, January 31, at ten o’clock in the morning Eastern Time, the hearings will be broadcast live online.
The hearing that will take place on Wednesday will be the first time that Congress has heard directly from Spiegel, Yaccarino, and Citron—despite the fact that there have been earlier hearings dedicated to the topic of teen safety. It is also only the second time that Chew, the creator of TikTok, has been before lawmakers. Last year, he was questioned by MPs about the app’s safety record and its connections to China.
Of course, Zuckerberg is well-versed in the process of attending these sessions by this point. Nevertheless, he will most certainly be subjected to a considerable amount of criticism from legislators as a consequence of a number of complaints concerning Meta’s safety policies that have surfaced in the past few months as a consequence of a lawsuit filed by forty-one state solicitors general. In the court filings that are part of the lawsuit, it is alleged that Meta ignored the fact that minors under the age of 13 were using its site, that it did little to prevent adults from sexually assaulting teenagers on Facebook, and that Zuckerberg personally intervened to prevent an effort to restrict plastic surgery filters on Instagram.
As was the case with other hearings with CEOs of technology companies, it is not obvious what sorts of significant policy changes could result from their testimony. The issue of child exploitation and internet safety has been the subject of a number of measures that have been introduced by lawmakers; however, none of these bills have been taken into law. Despite this, there is a rising support from both parties for measures that would protect adolescents from the effects of algorithms and data collection, as well as the implementation of standards for parental approval.