It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” The companies present: X Corp, represented by Linda Yaccarino; TikTok Inc, fronted by Shou Chew; Snap Inc, by Evan Spiegel; Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; and Jason Citron of Discord Inc.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) got the ghoulish proceedings underway with a video featuring victims and survivors. “I was sexually exploited on Facebook,” declares one. “I was sexually exploited on Instagram,” comes another. “I was sexually exploited on X.” And so forth.
Exploitation leads to distress and worse. “The child that … gets exploited is never the same again,” says a parent. One lost their son to suicide after being exploited on Facebook. Then, the failings of indifferent Big Tech operatives are carted out. “How many more kids will suffer and die because of social media?” goes the tune. “We need Congress to do something for our children and protect them.”
This supplied Durbin the ideal, moralistic (and moralising) springboard. And nothing excites those in Congress more than a moral crisis from which much mischief can be made. There was, he solemnly declared, a “sexual exploitation is a crisis in America.” In the decade from 2013 to 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) had received and increase from 1,380 cyber tips per day to 100,000 daily reports. The modern smartphone has become a hellish conduit of exploitation. “Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children. Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles. Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage, and groom children for abuse.”
From the Republican side, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham saw social media companies in their current design and operation as “dangerous products. They’re destroying lives, threatening democracy itself. These companies must be reined in or the worst is yet to come.”
The senators were ploughing familiar ground: the corrosion of mental health including instances of self-harm and suicide, the role of social media in perpetrating a number of crimes (drug dealing, sextortion) and the blissful digital heavens such companies have created for any number of unsavoury cults, ideologies and inclinations.
What, then, of it? For one thing, Zuckerberg, who was making his eighth appearance at such a hearing, was hardly going to offer anything constructive – at least in a binding sense. In the month just passed, internal Meta documents revealed a number of concerns from employees that the company’s messaging apps had featured in various instances of child exploitation. Little was done about it, which was precisely to be expected.
As a useful whipping boy of Congressional outrage, Meta’s CEO provided the perfect platform for senatorial outrage. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) could spice the airwaves (and the global social media universe) with his righteous display: “There’s families of victims here today. Have you apologised to the victims? Would you like to do so now?” Zuckerberg, reminded that he was on national television, did the performing seal act, turning around and facing the audience. A number of photos of deceased children were helpfully offered to torment the guilty soul. “I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg responded. “Everything that you all have gone through, it’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have had to suffer.”
It was a fantastically bloodless response, filled with the usual Big Tech baubles: industry standards would be met, innovations would be made, investments would follow, and new products of sterling safety engineered. As Zuckerberg went on to explain to Hawley, “I view my job and the job of our company is building the best tools that we can keep our community safe.” But the model as to how such companies extract, use, and monetise information – surveillance capitalism – is left untouched. Hawley’s cosmetic suggestion is to create a compensation fund for victims; the social media business model can continue to operate untrammelled because no member of Congress wants to be tarnished with the anti-corporation brush. Money always comes first.
Another great threat was also being teased out in the combative questions posed to the social media CEOs. Their companies have produced hideous, wounding and in some cases lethal products, all of which continue being used by billions, including haranguing, morally indignant politicians and unsuspecting children. But Congress also showed why it is also a problem to the very people it claims to be protecting.
The form this takes is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a co-sponsored initiative from Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). KOSA ostensibly deals with child safety, intended to empower the attorney general of every state, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to file lawsuits against apps or websites for failing to “prevent or mitigate” the various harms that supposedly affect children. Its effect, far from protecting children, will be something quite different, elevating the “duty of care” principle to scrub content that might cause “anxiety”, “depression” and any other number of undesirable behaviours.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes KOSA as a censorship bill. And it is easy to see why, with any item of information or news shared susceptible to being banned or modified for causing distress to children. “Ultimately,” writes the EFF’s Jason Kelley, “no amendment will change the basic fact that KOSA’s duty of care turns what is meant to be a bill about child safety into a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor uses.”
Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer was also deeply unimpressed, telling TechCrunch that, “Dozens of human rights, civil liberties, LGBTQ+ and racial justice groups oppose the reckless legislation being proposed at today’s hearing.”
In an attempt to stream roll the CEOs into supporting the bill, Senator Blumenthal asked where they stood on its merits. Spiegel and Yaccarino expressed support for KOSA. Those from TikTok, Meta and Discord dithered and expressed reservations. Citron was diplomatic. “We very much think that a national privacy standard would be great.” Chew noted that “some groups have raised some concerns”. Zuckerberg blandly stated that, “These are nuanced things.”
The hearing of January 31 ended with an open conspiracy against genuine change in the social media ecosystem. Instead of focusing on privacy and surveillance capitalism, the senators were more interested in the regulation of outrage over undesirable content. Instead of considering genuine reform, the CEOs made non-binding promises about cosmetic adjustments and fictional industry standards. Along the way, the children were well and truly forgotten.
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Did anyone else feel the confected outrage from the lawmakers were doing their best to shove blame onto the tech moguls having done sweet F.A. to control the exploitation that injured and often bereaved parents have been asking for for as long as I can remember?
Let’s be frank; social media is a snake pit. M/Billionaires don’t give a rat’s arse about the consequences of the use of their platforms; remind yourselves as to how FB has/is being used by, for example, terrorist groups to spread their bile, how the New Zealand mass murderer live-streamed his massacre in Christchurch, along with other platforms aiding and abetting children being groomed for sexual abuse, how teenagers are beset by angst as to their ‘fit’ within peer groups, how drug deals are prosecuted, how financial scams are promulgated, to name just a few examples. As long as the dollars roll in, and as long as piss-weak lawmakers diddle on the sidelines, nothing will change. Performative theatre in Washington is just that, performative. Does anyone really believe Zuckeberg et al are committed to stringent control & use of their products?
Social media is a reflection of humanity, containing the good, the bad and the indifferent. It accelerates the spread of information and the understanding of the experiences of existence, and how to navigate it and ‘profit’ or thrive by it. One has a choice whether to, or how to participate in it. Just like this AIMN blog, which is social media, in participating or not, there are potentially innumerable choices to make.
Deciding which elements of existence are to be ascribed as a ‘snake pit’ is surely a matter of perspective. Like evil and criminality, it’s based upon common morality, and common morality is largely decided by the acculturations persuaded and governed by religions and politics via substantially varying notions of freedom and proscriptions across jurisdictions.
Increasingly, there is a universal commonality about the constitution of evil and criminality, and much of that can surely be attributed to the acceleration of awareness via social media. As usual, the blockages to progress are affected by guileful profiteering via sectarian manipulation, sensation seeking mainstream media, and duping via political argy-bargy and the associated vested interests. And at the root of that is the feckless pursuit of power and its accoutrements. In all of that, notions of individual privacy are ludicrous, and in the main, always have been.
Indeed, the matter of prevention of evil and criminality is down to policing in all its forms, whether martial or not. And policing is controlled by politics and government, and given that politics and government are major participants in blockage, it’s inevitable that much of the policing will be seen as tinkering around the edges, and that in turn will give rise to corruption in policing, and sometimes the manifestation of coups.
In the pursuit against evil and criminality, if one cares to properly observe and think, we can witness almost daily these runs of interference and avoidance. Perhaps we are so used to them, they don’t register as serious corruptions.
Last night at 9:25pm, I watched on SBS Viceland, Cracking the Code; The Gang Code. It was a great story about bringing down organized crime communications across Britain and Europe (it also happened across America) by years of commitment by French police computer specialists who eventually smashed organized crime networks by bypassing private encryption codes and infecting the servers (then all the encrypted mobile phones) of the gang’s favorite system “EncroChat”. It resulted in the arrest of 1000s of organized crime ‘kingpins’, and the obliteration of the EncroChat system and servers.
The above is just one example, there are plenty of others, such as Israeli spyware Pegasus, American systems such as Echelon, and the numerous successes of Oz agencies tracking down and identifying the sources of the invasions of Russian hackers.
Plainly, given the will and resources, governments and policing can bring down evil and criminality. Any other notion appears to be just politics at play and political bullshit.