It’s been 20 years since Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg released a program called Thefacebook to his college community, launching a company that would capture over 3 billion users, flirt with a trillion-dollar valuation, and make so much money that it’s now kicking back a dividend to shareholders. And what better way to celebrate than raising your hand in a congressional hearing like a mafia boss or tobacco executive? “You have blood on your hands,” Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Zuckerberg this week. “You have a product that is killing people.” Cheers erupted from the gallery behind him, containing families who believe his creation helped kill their children.
The hearing, dubbed Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis, was a reminder to Zuckerberg that after 20 years his company is still, despite his excitement about creating metaverses and artificial general intelligence, at its heart a social network. There is an urgent need to address how his platform and others affect child safety and well-being, something Congress has fulminated about for years. The Judiciary Committee has drawn up several bills to force the companies to do better, including ones that demand better content policing and make it easier to enact civil and criminal penalties for social media companies. In addition to Zuckerberg, this week’s hearing called Discord’s Jason Citron, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, in theory to solicit testimony that could advance those bills. But the hearing was less about listening to the executives than flogging them for their sins. As Graham put it, “If we’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem, we’re going to die waiting.”
Indeed, legislators should stop wasting time with these evasive moguls and should simply pass the laws that they believe will save the lives of young people. Instead, they repeatedly moaned during the hearing that they cannot do their jobs because “armies of lawyers and lobbyists” are standing in the way. Funny, I don’t remember lobbyists being a required part of the process in my junior high school textbook How a Law Is Passed. Still, senator after senator complained about congressional colleagues who were passively blocking the bills, implying that they valued tech company support more than preventing teenagers from killing themselves. At one point Louisiana senator John Kennedy called on majority leader Charles Schumer ”to go to Amazon, buy a spine online, and bring this bill to the Senate floor.” Maybe the next hearing should have Chuck himself under the bright lights. I can imagine it now: Senator Schumer, is it true that one of your daughters works as an Amazon lobbyist and another has spent years working for Meta? Yes or no!
OK, let’s stipulate that, as the senators see it, the US congress doesn’t have the stones to pass social media child-safety legislation unless the companies call off their dogs. That would mean that the Senate has to work with the companies—or their armies of lobbyists—to find compromises. But the committee expended little effort on finding common ground with the companies. More than one senator thought it would be constructive to force each CEO to say whether they supported this bill or that as written. Almost universally, the CEOs attempted to say that there were things in the bill they agreed with but others they objected to and needed to work with lawmakers on. They could hardly get out a sentence before they were cut off, as Graham did in his interrogation of Discord’s Citron. “That’s a no,” he said, not giving him a chance to say what was needed to make it a yes. The Dirksen Office Building saw a lot of that kind of grandstanding this week.
One key tension between Congress and the tech industry is the status of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which holds users responsible for content on platforms, not the companies running those platforms. Nearly two hours into the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse finally asked the execs what modifications to Section 230 would be acceptable to them. But he apparently didn’t want that discussion to take time away from the main event—posturing, chest-thumping, and ritual humiliation—and asked them to send their thoughts in writing after the hearing. I would have preferred a genuine discussion, right then. Is it possible to reform Section 230 to make social media companies accountable for real negligence or misdeeds, without putting them out of business and killing off swathes of the internet? What are the free-speech implications? How does this relate to some state laws—now under consideration by the Supreme Court—that force platforms to display certain content even if they feel it violates their standards? Believe it or not, fruitful dialog is possible in a congressional hearing. We had one recently about AI where witnesses and senators actually dug into the issues, with no accusations that the witnesses were killing people. Even though AI might kill us all!
One potential solution to the social media problem mentioned by multiple senators was to make it possible to sue platforms that moderate content poorly. That would be all of them, according to Whitehouse, who told the CEOs, “Your platforms really suck at policing themselves.” (Isn’t that sentence itself toxic content?) Families who have filed such suits have had difficulty making progress because Section 230 seems to grant platforms immunity. It does seem fair to modify the rule so that if a company knowingly, or because of conspicuous negligence, refuses to take down harmful posts, it should be responsible for the consequences of its own actions. But that might unleash a tsunami of lawsuits based on frivolous claims as well as serious ones. For Republican lawmakers in particular, this is an interesting approach, since their party’s votes pushed through a 1995 law that did the opposite for an industry whose products lead to many more deaths than social media. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act banned victims of gun violence from suing munitions manufacturers. I would like to hear legislators grapple with that paradox, but I don’t think I’d get an answer without subpoena power.
A subplot of this week’s hearing was the opportunity to pummel TikTok CEO Chew about how much the platform is supposedly influenced by its Chinese ownership. We didn’t learn much, except that he is from Singapore, not China. In any case, that repartee was a distraction from the stated topic of child safety. Meanwhile, no one bothered to ask the executives what they were doing to make sure AI technologies in the hands of bullies and pedophiles would not make things worse.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s presence showed that the company cannot easily step away from its 20-year legacy of controversy. When he promoted Nick Clegg from being just a humble VP to president of global affairs two years ago, it was surely in hopes that the former UK politician would represent the company in uncomfortable hearings like this one. That would leave Zuckerberg to concentrate on the parts of the company that excite him—mixed reality and, more recently, the quest for general artificial intelligence. The founder and CEO had seemed to move on to concentrate on the emerging technologies he saw as defining the future of both his company and humanity. Not to mention his hobbies of mixed martial arts and raising macadamia-fed Wagyu cattle on his secret Hawaiian compound.
Instead, Zuckerberg was dragged back to Capitol Hill and shamed into standing up and facing the aggrieved mourners of young people lost by suicide after awful experiences on Facebook and Instagram. He blurted out an apology, “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” as some of the families held up photos of lost loved ones for him to see. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industrywide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
If Zuckerberg’s dreams of AGI come true, prose and pictures generated by robots, not our friends and family, may populate our news feed. Certainly his tepid mea culpa in the hearing room sounded like it could have been generated by Meta’s large language model Llama 2. But before we move on to Meta’s future, there’s too much that needs fixing in its present business. Also in need of a fix is a US Congress that pleads helplessness because of all those lobbyists. Happy anniversary, Zuck!
Last week marked the passing of David Kahn, the great historian of cryptology. David was a journalist—a longtime editor at Newsday—whose passion for ciphers led him to attempt a comprehensive book on the subject. This was challenging, as the National Security Agency, which was then so secretive that its acronym was widely held to stand for “No Such Agency,'' managed to get virtually all technical discussion of cryptography classified. The agency even tried to get Kahn’s book killed. Fortunately his publisher held firm. The Codebreakers, released in 1967, became the inspiration for a generation of scientists and coders who make huge innovations in the field in the private sector—and tools that we all use every day for commerce and privacy. Eventually, even the NSA came around, appointing Kahn as its first scholar in residence in 1993 and inducting him into its Hall of Honor in 2020. Personally, he was a big-hearted man who was generous with his time and advice. I was honored when he gave a wonderful blurb to my own book on cryptographers, Crypto. That book included the story of how Kahn produced The Codebreakers. Here’s an excerpt:
Two years into the project, Kahn quit his job to focus his efforts full-time on the book. He lived off his savings, bunking at his parents’ home and eating meals cooked by his grandmother. He wrote hundreds of letters, spent days in the New York Public Library, and most important, connected with people who had never previously told their stories. A high-ranking Department of Defense official allowed him access to two important World War II codebreakers—an astonishing event given how Cold War politics decreed that revealing information of this sort was virtually treason—if he agreed to submit his notes from the interview to the government. “I guess the Defense official didn’t know what he was getting into,” reasons Kahn, “and when the notes got submitted to the NSA, the government panicked and said I had to disregard the information. I respectfully declined.” …
To Kahn’s dismay, in March 1966, his editor sent the manuscript off to the Pentagon for scrutiny and comments. Of course it was then shipped to Fort Meade. The Defense Department wrote MacMillan’s chairman that publishing The Codebreakers “would not be in the national interest.” But MacMillan didn’t bend, less because of backbone, Kahn guesses, than the fact that by that point in the publication process “they had too much money put into it.”
Tom asks, “When the smartphone was new, people used to talk about public etiquette regarding their use. Now, it's common to see a public space full of people staring at their phones. What do you imagine the etiquette of AR headgear will be?”
Thanks, Tom. Readers will note that my excellent stand-in last week, Kate Knibbs, addressed this very question! But given the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro this week, I thought I’d take a swing at it as well. Consider it a two-fer, Tom!
As you imply, etiquette regarding new technology evolves over time. Right now, someone strolling down the street wearing a ski-mask-style Vision Pro would cause a stir. I expect that by the time people might become accustomed to it, Apple (and others) will already have created a more lightweight experience. It will be within social norms to wear these in all kinds of social situations. Those who rock Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, which are in the wild as we speak, have not experienced scorn like those unfortunate souls who donned Google Glass a decade ago.
If mixed-reality headsets catch on, I suspect the biggest etiquette problem will be the rudeness of those displaying physical presence while their actual attention is somewhere in the digital ozone. At a certain point, this may be so common we may no longer consider it rudeness, but we’ll still need a way to know when those with us in the flesh are mentally somewhere else entirely. Headsets now use a notification light to signal when the user is recording video. If these gadgets become ubiquitous, we will all come to assume that everything is being recorded, like it or not. Maybe the ultimate solution will be some sort of indication that the wearer is not watching a video, or checking out a stock price, or generating filters to enhance reality. This might be a green light that means, “I am choosing actual reality. I am paying attention. I am here with you.” That would be the apex of good etiquette. But don’t count on it.
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