If you love the smell of napalm in the morning, you\u2019ll love this smell, too: US senators grilled tech CEOs and Mark Zuckerberg specifically.<\/p>\n
At a Wednesday Senate hearing, lawmakers discussed how social media platforms are failing to protect children from escalating threats of sexual predation on their networks and urged Congress to pass legislation (via Reuters).<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s the latest effort by lawmakers to address the concerns of parents and mental health experts that social media companies prioritize profits over making sure their products are safe for children.<\/span><\/p>\n The hearing brought together Meta (Facebook, Instagram) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X\/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Discord CEO Jason Citron to testify.<\/span><\/p>\n Senator Lindsey Graham confronted Zuckerberg directly, but didn\u2019t leave his colleagues out of it as well:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cMr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don\u2019t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands\u201d, said Senator Lindsey Graham and added: \u201cYou have a product that\u2019s killing people\u201d. That last part is a bit ironic, given one of Lindsey Graham\u2019s latest tweets, but let\u2019s not digress.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis disturbing growth in child sexual exploitation is driven by one thing: changes in technology\u201d, says Senator Dick Durbin during the hearing. Durbin, being the Judiciary Committee\u2019s Democratic chairman, cited statistics from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children nonprofit group that showed skyrocketing growth in financial \u201csextortion\u201d \u2013 the malevolent act in which a predator tricks a minor into sending explicit photos and videos.<\/span><\/p>\n As the hearing kicked off, the committee played a video in which children spoke about being victimized on social media.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI was sexually exploited on Facebook,\u201d said one child in the video, who appeared in shadow.<\/span><\/p>\n Parents of kids who were harmed due to social media were present at the Senate hearing. They held pictures of their children and some jeered Zuckerberg during his statement and interrupted him with shouts.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg expressed regret about what they had experienced and pledged to work to prevent it from happening to others, but stopped short of taking responsibility for facilitating the abuse.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you love the smell of napalm in the morning, you\u2019ll love this smell, too: US senators grilled tech CEOs and Mark Zuckerberg specifically. At a Wednesday Senate hearing, lawmakers discussed how social media platforms are failing to protect children from escalating threats of sexual predation on their networks and urged Congress to pass legislation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":224688367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":255,"footnotes":""},"categories":[255],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224688366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple-tips-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224688366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224688366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224688366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224688367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224688366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224688366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonescanada.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224688366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}