How many more of these farces is Congress going to mount — summoning Big Tech executives before hearings on Capitol Hill (or virtually) and then squandering the opportunity to drill down on the real issues regarding antitrust, censorship and social media responsibility?
On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee produced another hearing that was light on both structure and substance as members grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The hearing was nominally focused on “misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms” and what the tech giants were doing to curb the spread of fake news on their platforms. But the hearing, as the rest of these Big Tech hearings have gone over the last few years, quickly morphed into an opportunity for elected officials to pepper the tech execs with questions on their pet topics like hate speech, censorship, antitrust concerns, political favoritism, tech addiction and whether kids should even be using social media. Those all may be topics worth exploring, but it was clear early on that this hearing would accomplish little on the subject of misinformation.
Ultimately, the hearing will likely be remembered more for its comical gaffes than being the starting point for any meaningful changes — and there were plenty of gaffes.
At one point later in the hearing, Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-Arizona) repeatedly called Zuckerberg “Mr. Zuckerman.” It wasn’t the only time a name was botched, either, with Pichai having his name mispronounced on multiple occasions.
And for what it’s worth, the flubs were bipartisan. One glaring example came when Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Florida) asked Zuckerberg, “Do you have concerns with what has appeared on your platform, hosted by YouTube?” The question was baffling since, as everybody (else) knows, Zuckerberg doesn’t run YouTube. (It’s a division of Google, whose CEO was also on the Zoom call.)
“Congressman, are you asking me about YouTube?” Zuckerberg replied.
Unfazed, Bilirakis doubled down, asking Zuckerberg if he was concerned about the content his children could watch on YouTube. “No,” Zuckerberg said, adding that his kids were 5 and 3 and used YouTube mostly for educational videos.
Those blunders may have been simple mistakes, but the takeaway was that Congress has little understanding of the tech giants they were grilling. And if you don’t know the basic details, how can you be expected to develop meaningful tech legislation?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually on Thursday (Getty Images)
There were other moments that were just bizarre. Midway through the hearing, Rep. Billy Long (R-Missouri) took a chunk of his 5-minute window to ask all three of the executives if they understand the difference between “yes” and “no.” Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey all said “yes,” with Dorsey responding, as he did all day, with the vigor of a man who had just completed the San Francisco Marathon. Long then smiled, saying he’d won a bet on whether he could get the cagey executives to answer a “yes or no” question during the hearing. That’s the kind of hearing it was.
To be sure, the five-and-a-half-hour event did offer some moments of insight. Perhaps the most illuminating came when Zuckerberg outlined his plan for updating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the broad legal shield that safeguards tech platforms from being sued for what its users post.
Zuckerberg suggested three amendments to the 25-year-old law:
— Tech companies should be required to provide transparency reports “on a regular cadence” on the “harmful” content that’s been removed from their platforms.
— Large tech platforms should have “effective systems” in place to handle illegal content, like the selling of illegal drugs.
— These amendments, if implemented, should be applied to large platforms, rather than small ones; Zuckerberg didn’t provide guidance on how to determine what constitutes a “large” or “small” tech company, but he said if these changes were in place when Facebook started out, it wouldn’t have grown to the size it did. In other words, the investment needed to effectively police social platforms is too big for small companies to make.
Dorsey agreed that there needs to be “more transparency” around how tech companies moderate their platforms, without elaborating much more than that. Overall, he appeared less receptive to the idea of a Section 230 overhaul to address the spread of misinformation.
“I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth, and I don’t think the government should be, either, ” Dorsey said.
The irony, of course, is that Twitter has been the most aggressive tech platform over the last few years when it comes to removing content and suspending (and even banning) users for violating its rules. Just ask former President Donald Trump.
