Online Child Safety hearings

[catherine]

Is anyone else watching this? The CEOs of social media platforms are being grilled in a Capitol Hill hearing. In attendance are parents of children who have killed themselves directly or indirectly due to their participation on TikTok and other platforms.

In particular, iris lilies, you are the Free Speech champion on the board... do you have an opinion? Should Zuckerberg be accountable to the parents of children who killed themselves? Should the parents be compensated by Meta? The GOP senators are really, really going after Zuckerberg and others--Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok--asking what I consider totally irrelevant questions about ties to the Communist party. Josh Hawley basically made Zuckerberg face the families to apologize.

Fascinating.

[pinkytoe]

Not watching but reading about it. Why have all these senators waited so long to do something? Humans do not self-regulate very well. I wonder how many campaign contributions these guys have gotten in the past from tech moguls?

[iris lilies]

I heard a bit of the hearings on NPR. As I was listening, I was thinking to myself how in the world do you really “protect “children who are hell-bent on getting online and reading material we think is inappropriate for them?

I mean, I honestly don’t know how the under 18 thing is regulated anyway. I learned that Eugenia Cooney’s account* on? TikTok was recently restricted to those over 18, so more of that I suppose might be ok. But I have real concern that Underage youth may be blocked from important websites. That’s what we found in the library world with Internet filters, they were perfectly legitimate sites that were blocked, and we had to go through and whitelist many sites.

Protecting the monolithic “under 18” group is such a problem because there is a world of difference between an 8 year old and a 17-year-old

* Eugenia Cooney is a severely anorexic young woman who is dying of the disease, and her followers are largely teenagers.

No, of course not, Mark Zuckerberg should not be held accountable for the death of children who—?are bullied or online abused and ?commit suicide—, but he could be held accountable for whatever laws and regulations he’s not following to the letter.

[LDAHL]

I’m convinced we have much more to fear from government stepping in to determine and enforce against “harmful” content than we do from the impact it may have on troubled souls.

[catherine]

I’m convinced we have much more to fear from government stepping in to determine and enforce against “harmful” content than we do from the impact it may have on troubled souls.

TBH, the most strident attacks on the social media giants were from the GOP. Did you catch Josh Hawley?

[LDAHL]

TBH, the most strident attacks on the social media giants were from the GOP. Did you catch Josh Hawley?

He put on quite a show, but there seemed to be a lot of bipartisan stridency in the air. Everybody got his sound bite.

[catherine]

He put on quite a show, but there seemed to be a lot of bipartisan stridency in the air. Everybody got his sound bite.

True.