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Senators go after the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, Discord, TikTok and Snapchat in a four hour hearing today. They were trying to corner the CEOs into admitting that their platforms harm kids in the name of money. Kind of a DUH! but it would be nice for them to admit it.
While they did not admit that, at least some of the CEOs said they were willing to support some of the child protection bills in Congress now.
Saying that differently, the Senators wanted the CEOs to say publicly that they supported suppressing free speech, but apparently only if it is the free speech that is unpopular in an election year.
If there was any question that the Senators were running for re-election, the hearing devolved into an attack on TikTok handing over data to the Chinese government and censoring news about Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square and Palestine and Israel.
If politicians could only stay focused on an issue like protecting kids from harm for even a few hours, that was not apparent in the hearings today.
BUT, it is an election year and it is unlikely that politicians can do anything other than grandstanding.
It is also likely that the bills being considered now are at least partially unconstitutional restraint of speech by the government and if so, it will also likely be overturned by the very Supreme Court that these politicians put into power.
For business owners, it is important to watch these bills and see what winds up inside the sausage (the law) that gets enacted. It is highly unlikely that any laws will be sufficiently focused to only affect 5 companies. That kind of law is almost impossible to craft. Most of the bills want to strip liability protections from businesses and that is something that the pro-business lobby is unlikely to take without a really big fight. That means that the lobbyists will threaten politicians where it counts (money) if they don’t do what the lobbyists want.
We will continue to watch these bills, if they move forward out of committee.
Credit: The Record and Vice