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Hawley Calls Out Facebook After Hearing: Zuckerberg Regularly Censored Conservatives, Not Child Predators
Senate Judiciary Committee member Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who successfully convinced Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to rise and apologize to victims’ families during a hearing on child exploitation on social media, told Fox News his platform gladly censored conservatives but has done little to stem predators.
On “Hannity,” host Sean Hannity asked the lawmaker if he believes Zuckerberg knows the extent to which bad actors use Facebook and Instagram to exploit, target and sexualize children.
“He absolutely knows what’s going on,” Hawley replied, adding senators have heard from Facebook whistleblowers who claim to have alerted Zuckerberg’s office they had collected information about potential exploitation that the executive purportedly “ignored.”
Hawley suggested Zuckerberg take 10% of his more than $140 billion net worth and allocate it to helping victims affected by exploitation on Meta platforms, and use the funds to target and remove potential sexual predators.
He noted how conservatives, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, collectively surmised that Facebook was censoring or suppressing free speech on key topics like alternative antiviral pharmaceuticals, vaccine hesitancy and later dissemination of the New York Post’s verified reportage about the existence and contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Parents of Children Victimized on Social Media Share Horror Stories With CEOs in Senate Hearing
Parents of children victimized on social media shamed the CEOs of America’s most prominent platforms as they entered a Senate hearing Wednesday — with many family members holding pictures of their deceased or scarred children while an emotional impact video was played.
A crowd of forlorn parents lined the front gallery of the packed Senate Judiciary Committee chamber as Committee members grilled the executives over their failure to protect underage users on their platforms.
An audible hiss spread from the gallery as the CEOs filed into their seats and the parents skewered them with penetrating glares. On hand at the hearing were: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron.
Once the execs entered, the crowd raised photos of their children who had either committed suicide or been psychologically damaged after being victimized by predators they met on Facebook and Instagram.
Watch: Lawmakers and Tech CEOs Push Online Age and ID Verification Proposals During Hearing on Child Safety
As we previously reported as something to look out for in 2024, U.S. lawmakers are intent on pushing online ID, age verification, and causing an end to online anonymity — despite constitutional concerns.
And during a hearing today, tech CEOs supported proposals that would greatly expand the requirements for online ID verification and erode the ability to use the internet without connecting your online activity to your identity.
The proposals are being pushed in the name of protecting children online but would impact anyone who doesn’t want to tie all of their online speech and activity to their real ID — over surveillance, censorship, or whistleblowing concerns.
In response to criticism from lawmakers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed for far-reaching online age verification standards that would impose age verification at the app store level — a proposal that would mean the vast majority of mobile app usage could be tied to a person’s official identity.
Senators Find Tech CEOs’ Responses Hollow After Four-Hour Hearing
During an unusually emotional hearing on Wednesday, senators spent hours trying to get a group of five tech CEOs to confront the harms their platforms have caused and submit to more checks on their power.
The Senate Judiciary Committee invited the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X, and Discord to face the families of children who’d died following cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, or other harmful events on their platforms. They asked why Section 230, the law that shields online platforms from being held liable for their users’ posts, should stop these families from facing them in court.
The CEOs expressed condolences for the families hurt on their services but reiterated the work and investment they’ve already made to keep users safe. Advocates and lawmakers were left unimpressed by the CEOs’ remarks — but emboldened to push forward their proposals.
A package of five kids online safety bills has already passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimous votes, including the EARN IT Act, which seeks to weaken Section 230 protections, and the Cooper Davis Act, that would require platforms to report known illicit drug trafficking on their sites to the Drug Enforcement Administration. KOSA, which was introduced in another committee, already has the support of nearly half the Senate.
14 Massachusetts Colleges Land on Restrictive Free Speech List: ‘Censorship and Terrible Policies’
More than a dozen Bay State colleges have been called out on a list of schools with policies that “clearly and substantially restrict free speech,” a contentious issue in recent months amid student protests during the Israel-Hamas war.
The number of colleges and universities with the harshest student speech codes increased for the second year in a row, according to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
FIRE’s “Spotlight on Speech Codes” report rates 489 of America’s top colleges and universities on their student speech policies. More than 85% of those schools have at least one policy that could be used to improperly censor students for constitutionally protected speech, FIRE reported.
This year’s report found that 98 colleges — or 20% — got a “red light” rating, meaning they have at least one policy that “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”
Massachusetts is home to 14 of those colleges: Boston College, Northeastern University, Tufts University, UMass Lowell, Fitchburg State University, Framingham State University, Worcester State University, Bridgewater State University, Salem State University, Clark University, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College, and Westfield State University.
Transparency Troubles: The Global Disinformation Index Faces Scrutiny Over Government Ties and Biased Practices
The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a U.S. government-funded pro-censorship organization, has come under fire for lacking transparency, ironically the same issue it labels non-mainstream websites for.
Despite hypocritically casting aspersions on sites that reject the mainstream narrative on many issues, the GDI, as per a report by the Washington Examiner, exhibits a conspicuous absence of this very transparency in its operations.
Billing itself as nonpartisan and objective while routinely favoring leftist narratives, the GDI has received over $100k from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. Part of the score it assigns to online platforms stems from the possibility of controversial interests emerging from shadowy ownership structures — a principle it doesn’t appear to abide by itself.
AI Can Speed Drug Discovery. But Is It Really Better Than a Human?
In mid-January, Genentech started recruiting 200 patients to test whether one of its experimental drugs can tame ulcerative colitis, a painful, incurable type of inflammatory bowel disease. Until then, the compound had only been given during experiments to treat lung and skin disorders.
Deciding whether to shift a drug for use against a different disease than originally intended often takes years of painstaking lab work, but the California biotech did it in just nine months. The difference: artificial intelligence, which the company says helped its researchers scan millions of possibilities to confirm the drug could be useful against diseases affecting the cells of the colon.
“It’s not like the human is not needed anymore,” says Aviv Regev, a Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology computational biologist who took a leave from her academic work to run Genentech’s research and development. “But the human all of a sudden gets the superpower.”
