- Will you commit to ending "finsta"?
- Senator, again, let me explain,
we don't actually, we don't actually do "finsta".
- Every now and then, you're gonna watch a hearing
and you're gonna see a really unfortunate question
come out of a senator or a Congress person's mouth.
And that will get all of the clicks.
I would argue though that there are also still
a lot of very smart questions being asked at the hearings.
And, more importantly, it's what's happening
after the hearing that matters.
- In hours of inquiry at tech
and social media hearings on Capitol Hill,
a few questions inevitably end up being duds.
- It was reported that Donald Trump Jr got taken down
for a period of time, because he put something up.
Why did that happen?
- Congressman, well, first to be clear,
I think what you might be referring
to happened on Twitter,
so it's hard for me to speak to that.
- When a handful of lawmakers show up
to these big-ticket hearings
prepared with the wrong questions,
it demonstrates a misunderstanding
of the full scope of these tech companies and how they operate.
- So, how do you sustain a business model
in which users don't pay for your service?
- Senator, we run ads.
- What is the hearing even for? Right?
Because there's multiple purposes to a hearing.
Is it because they're trying to educate the public
and their constituents,
in order to get their constituents to care enough
about a matter to make it a voting issue?
Are they trying to shame certain executives?
Are they trying to win political points?
Or is a hearing truly about trying to figure out
how to enact the smartest legislation possible
that allows the Internet to flourish
and all the great things that social media can provide,
while still protecting the public from the downside?
- I have a 7-year-old granddaughter
who picked up her phone, before the election,
and she's playing a little game --
a kind of game a kid would play --
and up on there pops a picture of her grandfather.
How does that show up on a 7-year-old's iPhone,
who's playing a kid's game?
- Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company
and so I mean -- -It might've been an Android.
It's just it was a hand-me-down of some kind.
- Without the right questions, you won't get the right answers.
And without the right answers,
you can't effectively regulate the thing being questioned.
So, what should Congress be asking?
- You know, for years,
I and others have been talking about
whether or not social media has helped radicalize people.
So, let's look at January 6th.
What are some of the questions we could ask
to help determine that?
Because yes, anger, mistrust, radicalization,
all these things existed before social media.
But, as someone who actually worked
in the counter-extremism world for most of my career
before going to Facebook, it was crystal-clear, to me,
that Facebook was enabling a radicalization
at a scale we had never seen before.
And so I would love to see our representatives dig in
on this more, with questions such as --
do your tools actually connect people to radicalized or extreme
or even illegal groups and content
that they were not necessarily seeking out themselves?
- How Congress acts in the face of these issues
is more pertinent now than ever.
- If the Internet has come a long way in the last 25 years,
shouldn't Internet regulations, too?
- Rather than policing their own behavior, Silicon Valley
is starting to shift that onus back to Congress.
- There's no, "this is the one thing they need to do first"
and that's part of the problem.
Because it's such a vast and complicated sphere
that anything government tries to do right
now is met with a lot of anger that it's not enough.
We don't need our law makers to understand
every technical detail of how it works,
but we do need them to ensure
that the companies are showing up,
answering the actual detailed questions,
and if they don't have the answers,
then figuring out what that means
and what these companies should be allowed to actually do.
- And again, the Internet is not something
that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck.
It's a series of tubes.