The CEOs of five top social media platforms, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Linda Yaccarino, are being hauled in front of the Senate on Wednesday for a hearing to highlight the continuing risk of child-sexual abuse material on their sites.
Pointing the finger at them will be members of Congress — who have spent years highlighting this issue without ever agreeing on a way to fix it.
Despite numerous bills, headline-grabbing hearings and a push from President Joe Biden in his last two State of the Union addresses, Congress has only passed one kids’ safety law in the last decade, a narrow measure dealing with online child sex trafficking. Since then, both the House and the Senate have been stymied by disagreement over specific security and privacy provisions, and by nearly unanimous opposition from the tech industry itself.
“I’ve had hope for the last decade that Congress would do something, but they’ve pretty much struck out,” Jim Steyer, CEO of the nation’s largest kids’ advocacy group Common Sense Media, told POLITICO.
Wednesday’s hearing will be Zuckerberg’s eighth time in the hot seat, and will feature the