US senators spent three and a half hours questioning the heads of some of the biggest social networks, criticizing the fact that these big companies have not done much to protect children and teenagers from harmful content. Zuckerberg was forced to apologize to his parents in Washington. Probably, not much will change for the better.

Senators questioned the executives of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord, accusing them of creating a crisis in America by ignoring what has become increasingly clear in recent years: children and teenagers are suffering greatly from harmful content on these networks, and big companies are not doing enough to resolve this situation. Another charge was that they only care about profits and ignore the real problems that are getting worse.

“Your products are killing people” or “your blood is on your hands” were some of the harsher lines the senators said. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has been at the center of some of the sharper controversy when he was asked whether he fired people after it was revealed that Facebook was well aware that its products were harming teenagers.

Zuckerberg avoided answering many questions and was also forced to say whether he would offer compensation to parents who lost their children after they, for example, bought highly dangerous drugs from people selling them through Facebook or Instagram. There have been many young people who have died from overdoses of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain reliever that is often used illegally as a drug, even in combination with heroin or cocaine.

Senator Josh Hawley pressed Zuckerberg to apologize for the damage Facebook caused. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the audience and said: “I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. No one should have to suffer like this and go through what your families went through.”

Some parents had pictures on social media of children who had died from horrible things.

The problem is by no means new, but in recent years it has become more acute: children are appearing online at an ever younger age, addicted to short videos that change quickly one after another, and exposed to many dangers, from overtly sexual content to suicide. The major networks have been accused of not doing much to even partially address the problem, even though they are aware of the harm the content they publish is causing to young people.

The head of TikTok was accused of having close ties to China and the Communist Party there, and the senator insisted on answering the question: “why don’t we just ban TikTok in the United States?”. The answer was that TikTok is investing billions in plans to prove that user data does not end up in China.

The issue of the dangers to which children are exposed on social networks has united Republicans and Democrats, enemies in many other spheres. Bills are being proposed to force tech platforms to be more accountable, but it’s hard to believe that these proposals will soon become law.

“Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies in front of us, even if you don’t believe it, you have bloody hands. You have products that kill people,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Among the most brutal were Republican senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Amy Klobuchar (Democrat of Minnesota).

In addition to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Linda Jaccarino (X, ex-Twitter), Shaw Zi Choo (TikTok), Evan Spiegel (Snap) and Jason Citron (Discord) were at the audition.

Sources: AFP, New York Times