Congress made a spectacle in wrangling the CEOs of tech companies, Meta, Twitter, Discord, and TikTok. Senator Graham displayed the righteous anger of a disappointed principle and wagged his finger at each one of them for not doing enough to protect kids online. Senator Josh Hawley takes the cake in convincing Mr. Zuckerberg to apologize to the families who lost their children to suicide. Congress’s inaction is quite frankly, appalling.
The privacy bill languishes in yesteryear’s purgatory, while the once-urgent call to reform section 230 has seemingly faded into the background noise of the Capitol. As for regulating social media companies? It’s as if the very concept has been ghosted in the halls of Congress. No legislation has moved, even when the Democrats controlled Congress.
Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post reports “Some kids and activists are speaking out against the Kids Online Safety Bill and how it might violate First Amendment rights and result in more sensitive data collection instead of its stated goal of protecting minors.”
The latter concern is indeed valid. Here’s how I understand it: to verify that a user is underage, you’d need to collect and store that a piece of sensitive data, their age. Once you know that they are underage, you’re liable to restrict their access to your content (a possible first amendment violation where Congress cannot pass laws that abridges freedom of speech ). Isn’t that precisely the kind of violation these lawmakers are aiming to prevent in the first place?
So yes, Congress put on quite a show, but until we see some actual legislation, it’s just that – a show.