But tech CEO hearings still aren’t working. Even with sharper, more specific questions, lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee struggled to get new answers from tech executives.
They spent much of yesterday’s more than five-hour-long hearing telling the executives that it was time to regulate tech companies and that Congress was going to act now – but with few specifics about their own plans.
“What witnesses need to take away from this hearing is that self-regulation has come to the end of its road,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee focused on consumer protections, said in her opening remarks.
But for hours, they jumped from issue to issue with little focus or coordination, lunging from the tech companies’ role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, child exploitation online, data privacy, bias in algorithms and false claims about climate change. The disjointed topics revealed that lawmakers haven’t even reached a consensus about what the biggest problem with social media is, let alone how to address it with regulation.
Here are the top takeaways from yesterday’s marathon of a hearing:
Lawmakers agree that Section 230’s days should be numbered. But there’s not broad agreement on how to change it.
There was a clear escalation in lawmakers’ rhetoric, as they repeatedly made the point that Silicon Valley had broken their trust and needed to be reined in with tougher rules.
Lawmakers from both parties made the case that tech companies needed to take greater responsibility for what happens on their platforms and how that affects people offline. They took aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, arguing that tech companies should no longer have broad immunity from lawsuits for the content that people post on their services.
Yet it was also clear from the hearing that a consensus hasn’t built around a specific bill to overhaul the decades-old law, which has been hailed for creating the Internet.
Some lawmakers mentioned their own bills that make narrow changes to the provision. At Thursday’s hearing, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) floated her bill, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, that would amend Section 230 to remove tech companies’ protections from lawsuits when their algorithms amplify content that leads to offline violence. And Rep. Yvette Clarke announced plans to introduce a bill that would change Section 230 to prevent discrimination in online advertising.
Tech executives didn’t take responsibility for the role that their platforms played in the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In one of the first questions of the hearing, a top committee Democrat asked each tech executive if they were responsible for the violent riot that resulted in death and destruction at the Capitol. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) pressed the executives to respond with a yes or no answer.
Only Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said yes, with the caveat that lawmakers had to take into account the broader information system. Zuckerberg and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai refused to give a straight answer.
Lawmakers seized on that response, chastising the executives for not acknowledging their role and that they profit off of the spread of inflammatory posts.
“You’re not bystanders,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “And what happens online doesn’t stay online. It has real-world consequences.”
Former president Donald Trump barely came up, even among Republicans who have long criticized tech companies as being biased against conservatives.
It was the first hearing since the companies’ unprecedented decision to suspend the accounts of a sitting president. Yet conservatives trying to make the case that tech companies were biased against them barely brought it up, instead focusing on incidents that happened before previous CEO hearings, such as Twitter’s decision to block the dissemination of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden on its platform.
The lack of Trump mentions — and also questions from conservatives about the tech companies’ crackdown on claims of election fraud — showed that Republicans had little interest in continuing to fight the tech companies on their treatment of the former president. Fifteen of the 26 Republican members of the committee who voted to overturn President Biden’s election victory. And a Washington Post analysis found that seven of those members tweeted “Stop the Steal” or other content undermining the election results themselves.
Social media’s harmful effects on children was a major focus of lawmakers from both parties.
The hearing indicated that one area of bipartisan consensus might be updating privacy laws to better protect children on the Internet.
Lawmakers demanded that the tech companies do more to protect children and teens from cyberbullying and social media addiction. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) accused the CEOs of Google and Facebook of making money by advertising to children who technically aren’t allowed on their platforms.
The current law, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, prohibits companies from collecting the data of children under 13 in most circumstances or targeting them with personalized advertising.
“Of course, every parent knows that kids under the age of 13 are on Facebook and Instagram,” Castor said. “The problem is that you know it. And you know that the brain and social development is still evolving at a young age. There are reasons in the law that we said that cutoff is at 13.”
Legislators also zeroed in on Facebook and Google’s creation of platforms for children. BuzzFeed reported last week that Facebook is planning an Instagram for children. The two companies also have Facebook Messenger Kids and YouTube Kids, respectively.
Some critics have said that those types of underage-targeted services are aimed at getting children hooked on social media, early.
Pichai and Zuckerberg said children under 13 aren’t allowed on the platform, so they don’t make money off them.
You can catch up on the rest of my coverage of yesterday’s hearing with colleagues Gerrit De Vynck, Rachel Lerman and Elizabeth Dwoskin here.
Rant and rave
Dorsey used Twitter during the hearing, liking tweets and posting a poll that alluded to lawmakers’ yes/no questions. Dorsey was called out for his poll, Emily Chang of Bloomberg News notes:
His activity on Twitter appeared to undermine the CEOs’ arguments that their platforms are not overly addictive. The Telegraph’s James Titcomb:
Business Insider’s Alexei Oreskovic noted how Dorsey’s appearance has changed in the past three years:
Our top tabs
Amazon has denied claims its workers urinated in bottles to meet quotas. But policy documents tell a different story.
The company in a tweet earlier this week denied that its employees urinate in bottles because they’re unable to take bathroom breaks while under pressure to meet productivity quotas. But documents obtained by Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept show that management knew this was happening and did nothing to ease pressure on workers. “In some instances, employees even defecated in bags,” according to the report.
The documents add to criticism of Amazon’s workplace culture as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to go to Alabama today to support workers during a critical union election. Amazon faced greater scrutiny of its employees’ bathroom habits after Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) raised them on Twitter. After the Intercept report, he continued to raise attention to the practices, questioning why Amazon tried to cast itself as a progressive employer.
Amazon did not provide a statement to the Intercept before publication. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Amazon’s Twitter account has been aggressively defending the company from political attacks, and also responding to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s criticisms about how much it pays in taxes.
President Biden readies an executive order for breach disclosures in the wake of high-profile hacks.
A draft version of the order would require companies to keep more records for investigations of the breaches and work with federal agencies as they respond, according to Christopher Bing, Nandita Bose and Joseph Menn of Reuters. The executive order comes as the Biden administration plans its responses to the devastating SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange hacks, which U.S. officials and Microsoft have said were carried out by Russian and Chinese hackers.
A National Security Council spokeswoman told Reuters that a final decision on the executive order has not been made. The order could affect large software companies like Microsoft, the subject of congressional ire.
The NLRB ordered Elon Musk to delete an anti-union tweet and reinstate a pro-union worker who was fired.
The National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and his electric-car company broke the law when they fired a worker and disciplined another employee, Faiz Siddiqui reports. The board’s decision is a high-profile rebuke of Musk, one of the world’s richest men.
Thursday’s ruling was issued by two Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee. Its rulings can be appealed to federal court. Tesla, which did not respond to a request for comment, has argued that Musk’s May 2018 tweet was protected by the First Amendment.
Inside the industry
Trade groups say the Biden administration should prioritize open data.
Nine groups, including the Software Alliance and the Information Technology Industry Council, want Biden to appoint a chief data officer to coordinate open-data efforts across the government. The groups say that the OPEN Government Data Act, which became law in 2019, has not been fully implemented, hampering the government’s open-data efforts.
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Daybook
- FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr speaks at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event on securing U.S. networks from China on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m.
