Meta, TikTok CEOs Grilled at Senate Hearing for Child Exploitation on Social Media
By Movieguide® Contributor
Social media giants, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Chew, were grilled at recent Senate hearings where lawmakers urged for more protections against the sexual exploitation of children through their platforms.
“[Parents] are counting on us as much as they’re counting on the industry to do the responsible thing,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) said at the hearing.
In Zuckerberg’s opening statement, he cited that research “has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having a worse mental health outcomes.”
Durbin criticized the Meta CEO, saying his statement “didn’t make any sense.”
Referring to the parents in attendance whose children have been affected by exploitation on social media, he told Zuckerberg, “There isn’t a parent in this room who has a child who is going through an emotional experience like this who wouldn’t tell you or me, ‘They changed right in front of my eyes,’” he said.
“The[y] hole themselves up in their room, they no longer reached out to their friends, they lost all interest in school. These are the mental health consequences that I think come with the abuse of this right, they have access to this technology,” the senator continued.
Movieguide® previously reported the link between the mental health of children and social media:
From mental health struggles to sleep problems, excessive screen time and social media continue to detrimentally affect young people.
Adventist Health reported a few of social media’s impacts:
Bullying: In 2021, 16 percent of high school students said they were bullied through text messaging or social median in the past year.
Body image: About 1 in 3 girls say they feel bad about their bodies at least once a week when using TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
Sleep: When teens stay up late staring at phones and other screens, the blue light that is emitted inhibits their bodies from secreting melatonin and they get less REM sleep, which can affect short-term memory.
Depression: In 2019, 1 in 3 high school students in the U.S. reported within the last year, they had felt so sad or hopeless, they couldn’t take part in their normal activities. That’s a 40 percent increase from 2009, a spike that could correlate to the rise in social media over the past decade.
Anxiety: Nearly half of teens surveyed about an increase in anxiety, stress and depression blame their overuse of social media.
At the hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gave Zuckerberg a harsher rebuke: “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. You have a product that is killing people.”
At Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) prompting, Zuckerberg turned to the audience and apologized.
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” he told the families. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much, and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
One of the aims of the hearing was a push for a revision of Section 230 which protects social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok from being sued for third party content.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) advocated for such revisions, referring to a teenager who became suicidal after sexually explicit photos of him were posted on Twitter. The family attempted to sue the company for not taking down the photo, but Section 230 protected Twitter from legal action.
“There is nothing about those set of facts that tells me that Section 230 performed any public service in that regard,” Whitehouse said.
Chew also faced scrutiny when Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) repeatedly asked about any association he might have with the Chinese Communist Party.
“Have you ever been associated with or affiliated with the Chinese Community Party?” Cotton asked.
“No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean,” Chew responded.
TikTok has faced criticism due to its parent company, ByteDance, and its connection to the Chinese government. Chew told the committee of his company’s commitment to online safety and expressed shared concern with the parents at the hearing.
“As a father of three young children myself, I know that the issues that we’re discussing today are horrific and the nightmare of every parent,” Chew stated. “I am proud of our efforts to address the threats to young people online from a commitment to protecting them to our industry-leading policies.”
The CEO says his company plans to invest $2 billion in trust and safety in 2024.
Following the hearing, Attorney General Raul Torres said at a press conference that Zuckerberg’s appearance at the hearing was a “command performance” and that he “needs to start acting like a parent.”
“He needs to think about what it would be like to live through the pain and heartbreak that these parents have had to endure,” Torres said. “He needs to really take a step back and evaluate his priorities and start helping us build a better future and stop fighting real change.”
Torres filed a lawsuit last December against the Meta CEO, claiming that the company was not doing enough to protect children from predators and explicit content, as reported by Movieguide®:
“Meta’s business model of profit over child safety and business practices of misrepresenting the amount of dangerous material and conduct to which its platforms expose children violates New Mexico law,” the lawsuit says, naming Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant. “Meta should be held accountable for the harms it has inflicted on New Mexico’s children.”
To investigate the extent to which children are endangered on Meta’s platforms, the New Mexico Attorney General’s office created Meta accounts posing as minors as young as 12 years old. The investigation found that these accounts were able to access “sexual or self-harm content.”
“After viewing accounts that showed sexually suggestive pictures of girls, Instagram’s algorithms directed investigators to other accounts with images of sexual intercourse and sexualized images of minors,” the complaint says.
The algorithm also helped investigators find potential child sexual abuse material by suggesting terms for them to search that would not be blocked by the sites’ safety features.
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