Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) addressed the CEOs of five social media companies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” on Wednesday.
Wednesday’s hearing, which focused on the “failures of Big Tech to protect kids from sexual exploitation online,” included testimony from the following five witnesses:
- Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X
- Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok
- Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap
- Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta
- Jason Citron, CEO of Discord
Blackburn briefly addressed all five witnesses by thanking each for their participation in the hearing before pivoting her focus to TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Meto CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The Tennessee senator first addressed TikTok’s Chew, recounting a recent report detailing the Chinese-owned social media platform’s interest in permanently moving its Nashville operations into a new office building in Music Row.
“Mr. Chew, we’ve heard that you’re looking at putting a headquarters in Nashville and likewise in Silicon Valley and Seattle. And what you’re going to find probably is that the welcome mat is not going to be rolled out for you in Nashville like it would be in California,” Blackburn said. “There are a lot of people in Tennessee that are very concerned about the way TikTok is basically building dossiers on our kids the way they are building those on their ‘virtual you.’ And also that information is held in China, in Beijing… And we also know that a major music label yesterday said they were pulling all of their content off your site because of your issues on pay, on artificial intelligence, and because of the negative impact on our kids’ mental health.”
Blackburn then pivoted to questioning Meta’s Zuckerberg, where she confronted the CEO’s recent reference to the platform’s young users in terms of their lifetime value of being roughly $270.
“Mr. Zuckerberg, one of the things that really concerned me is that you referred to your young users in terms of their lifetime value of it being roughly $270 per teenager,” Blackburn said. “What could possibly lead you… I mean, I listen to that. I know you’re a dad, I’m a mom, I’m a grandmom. And how could you possibly even have that thought?”
Blackburn continued by questioning Zuckerberg on his company’s failure to immediately remove harmful content on its social platforms, including a pedophile ring, inquiring as to why that specific content did not violate the platform’s community standards.
“It may be that in this case we made a mistake and missed something,” Zuckerberg said.
Blackburn urged Zuckerberg and his company to “come to the table” and work with Congress to pass bills addressing the protection of children online instead of funding “an army of lawyers and lobbyists” to fight such efforts.
“Mr. Zuckerberg…it appears that you’re trying to be the premier sex trafficking site…the problem is, we’ve been working on this stuff for a decade. You have an army of lawyers and lobbyists that have fought us on this every step of the way… So are you going to stop funding these groups? Are you going to stop lobbying against this and come to the table and work with us?… The door is open. We’ve got all these bills…Each and every one of you needs to come to the table, and you need to work with us. Kids are dying,” Blackburn said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
I love MORAL OUTRAGE! MORAL OUTRAGE!
Nobody gives a sh!t about Marsha Blackburn, because she doesn’t know anything or reference facts. She’s just a mouthpiece, repeating information fed to her. She won’t even do interviews unless they’re all pre-programmed set-ups.