Mark Zuckerberg and Senator Hawley: Heated Showdown

Mark Zuckerberg and Senator Josh Hawley’s recent clash in the Senate Judiciary Committee highlighted critical issues surrounding child safety on social media platforms. During the heated exchange, Zuckerberg defended Meta’s efforts to protect teens and combat harmful content online, while Hawley sharply criticized the company’s handling of teen mental health concerns and accountability. The conversation touched on essential themes regarding social media’s impact, corporate responsibility, and the measures Meta has taken to address growing concerns about its platforms’ influence on young users.

Defending Social Media’s Role in Society

In his testimony, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the positive aspects of social media, particularly its role in helping teens express themselves, stay connected, and explore the world around them. He noted that many teens report a positive experience using Meta’s services, highlighting the following points:

1. Tools for Parents: Zuckerberg mentioned that Meta has built over 30 tools for parents, enabling them to set time limits, monitor their children’s interactions, and report harmful behavior.
2. Support for Teens: Meta has introduced features designed to protect teens, including nudges that remind them to take breaks from Instagram and restrictions on adult interactions with teens.
3. Scientific Evidence: Citing a report from the National Academies of Science, Zuckerberg argued that current research does not conclusively link social media use to negative mental health outcomes in teens.

Zuckerberg stressed Meta’s ongoing commitment to child safety, expressing pride in the $20 billion investment in safety measures since 2016, which includes sophisticated AI tools to proactively detect harmful content.

Key Lessons and Themes

The Senate hearing underscored several key lessons and themes that resonate beyond the tech industry:

1. The Responsibility of Tech Companies: Meta’s efforts to improve online safety demonstrate the importance of corporate responsibility in addressing societal challenges.
2. Balancing Innovation and Accountability: While technological advancements are crucial, it is equally important for companies to be held accountable for their impact on users, especially vulnerable populations like teens.
3. Transparency and Action: Zuckerberg’s testimony revealed the need for more transparency in how social media platforms handle safety issues. Hawley’s persistent questioning highlighted the public demand for tangible action and accountability.
4. The Complexities of Mental Health: The debate over social media’s impact on mental health underscores the complexity of the issue, with research still evolving and no clear consensus on the direct effects of social media usage.

As this conversation continues to unfold, it is clear that tech companies, lawmakers, and society must work together to create a safer online environment. While Meta has made strides in improving safety and parental control, the exchange between Zuckerberg and Hawley serves as a reminder that much more remains to be done.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Chairman Durbin, Ranking Member Graham, and members of the committee, every day teens and young people do amazing things on our services. They use our apps to create new things, express themselves, explore the world around them, and feel more connected to the people they care about. Overall, teens tell us that this is a positive part of their lives, but some face challenges online, so we work hard to provide parents and teens support and controls to reduce potential harms.

Being a parent is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Technology gives us new ways to communicate with our kids and feel connected to their lives, but it can also make parenting more complicated. And it’s important to me that our services are positive for everyone who uses them.

We are on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids. Over the last eight years, we’ve built more than 30 different tools, resources, and features that parents can set time limits for their teens using our apps, see who they’re following, or if they report someone for bullying.

For teens, we’ve added nudges to remind them when they’ve been using Instagram for a while, or if it’s getting late and they should go to sleep, as well as ways to hide words or people without those people finding out.

We put special restrictions on teen accounts on Instagram. By default, accounts for under 16s are set to private, have the most restrictive content settings, and can’t be messaged by adults that they don’t follow or people they aren’t connected to.

With so much of our lives spent on mobile devices and social media, it’s important to look into the effects on teen mental health and well-being. I take this very seriously. Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.

A recent National Academies of Science report evaluated over 300 studies and found that research, quote, “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent mental health at the population level,” end quote. It also suggested that social media can provide significant positive benefits when young people use it to express themselves, explore, and connect with others.

Still, we’re going to continue to monitor the research and use it to inform our roadmap. Keeping young people safe online has been a challenge since the internet began, and as criminals evolve their tactics, we have to evolve our defenses, too.

We work closely with law enforcement to find bad actors and help bring them to justice, but the difficult reality is that no matter how much we invest or how effective our tools are, there are always more… there’s always more to learn and more improvements to make.

But we remain ready to work with members of this committee, industry, and parents to make the internet safer for everyone.

I’m proud of the work that our teams do to improve online child safety on our services and across the entire internet. We have around 40,000 people overall working on safety and security, and we’ve invested more than 20 billion dollars in this since 2016, including around 5 billion dollars in the last year alone.

We have many teams dedicated to child safety and teen well-being, and we lead the industry in a lot of the areas that we’re discussing today.

We build technology to tackle the worst online risks and share it to help our whole industry get better, like Project Lantern, which helps companies share data about people who break child safety rules, and we’re founding members of Take It Down, a platform which helps young people prevent their nude images from being spread online.

We also go beyond legal requirements and use sophisticated technology to proactively discover abusive material, and as a result, we find and report more inappropriate content than anyone else in the industry.

As the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put it this week, META goes, quote, “above and beyond to make sure that there are no portions of their network where this type of activity occurs,” end quote.

I hope we can have a substantive discussion today that drives improvements across the industry, including legislation that delivers what parents say they want, a clear system for age verification and control over what apps their kids are using.

Three out of four parents want app store age verification, and four out of five want parental approval whenever teens download apps. We support this. Parents should have the final say on what apps are appropriate for their children and shouldn’t have to upload their ID every time. That’s what app stores are for.

We also support setting industry standards on age-appropriate content and limiting signals for advertising to teens to age and location and not behavior.

At the end of the day, we want everyone who uses our services to have safe and positive experiences.

Before I wrap up, I want to recognize the families who are here today, who have lost a loved one or lived through some terrible things that no family should have to endure.

These issues are important for every parent and every platform. I’m committed to continuing to work in these areas, and I hope we can make progress today.

Senator Hawley:
Mr. Zuckerberg, let me start with you. Did I hear you say in your opening statement that there’s no link between mental health and social media use?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, what I said is I think it’s important to look at the science. I know it’s… people widely talk about this as if that is something that’s already been proven, and I think that the bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that.

Senator Hawley:
Well, really, let me just remind you of some of the science from your own company. Instagram studied the effect of your platform on teenagers. Let me just read you some quotes from the Wall Street Journal’s report on this.

Company researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of teenagers, most notably teenage girls. Here’s a quote from your own study. Quote, “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Here’s another quote, “Teens blamed Instagram,” this is your study, “for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” That’s your study.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, we try to understand the feedback and how people feel about the services… we can improve.

Senator Hawley:
Wait a minute, your own study says that you make life worse for one in three teenage girls… you increase anxiety and depression. That’s what it says, and you’re here testifying to us in public that there’s no link. You’ve been doing this for years. For years, you’ve been coming in public and testifying under oath that there’s absolutely no link, your product is wonderful, the science is nascent, full speed ahead, while internally you know full well your product is a disaster for teenagers.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, that’s not true.

Senator Hawley:
And yet you keep right on doing what you’re doing… right?

Mark Zuckerberg:
That’s not true.

Senator Hawley:
Let me show you some other facts I know that you’re familiar with. Wait a minute! Wait a minute! That’s not a question. Those are facts, Mr. Zuckerberg. That’s not a question.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Those aren’t facts.

Senator Hawley:
Let me show you some more facts. Here is some information from a whistleblower who came before the Senate and testified under oath in public. He worked for you… he’s a senior executive. Here’s what he showed he found when he studied your products.

So for example, this is girls between the ages of 13 and 15 years old. Thirty-seven percent of them reported they had been exposed to nudity on the platform… unwanted, in the last seven days. Twenty-four percent said that they had experienced unwanted sexual advances, they’d been propositioned, in the last seven days. Seventeen percent said they had encountered self-harm content pushed at them in the last seven days.

Now I know you’re familiar with these stats because he sent you an email where he lined it all out. I mean, we’ve got a copy of it right here. My question is… who did you fire for this? Who got fired because of that?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, we study all this because it’s important. We want to improve our services.

Senator Hawley:
Well, you just told me a second ago you studied it, but there was no linkage. Who did you fire?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I said you mischaracterized…

Senator Hawley:
Thirty-seven percent of teenage girls between 13 and 15 were exposed to unwanted nudity in a week on Instagram. You knew about it. Who did you fire?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, this is why we’re building all these different tools.

Senator Hawley:
Who did you fire?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, I don’t think that’s…

Senator Hawley:
Who did you fire?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I’m not gonna answer that.

Senator Hawley:
Because you didn’t fire anybody, right? You didn’t take any significant action.

Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s not appropriate to talk about it…

Senator Hawley:
It’s not appropriate. Do you know who’s sitting behind you? You’ve got families from across the nation whose children are either severely harmed or gone… and you don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about steps that you took? The fact that you didn’t fire a single person?

Let me ask you this… have you compensated any of the victims?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Sorry?

Senator Hawley:
Have you compensated any of the victims? These girls… have you compensated them?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t believe so.

Senator Hawley:
Why not? Don’t you think they deserve some compensation for what your platform has done? Help with counseling services? Help with dealing with the issues that your service has caused?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Our job is to make sure that we build tools to help keep people safe.

Senator Hawley:
Are you going to compensate them?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, our job and what we take seriously is making sure that we build industry-leading tools to find harmful content, take it off the services, and to build tools that empower parents.

Senator Hawley:
So you didn’t take any action, you didn’t fire anybody, you haven’t compensated a single victim. Let me ask you this… there’s families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now?

Well, they’re here… you’re on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product? Show them the pictures. Would you like to apologize for what you’ve done to these good people?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through. Nobody should have to go through the things your families have suffered. This is why we have invested so much, and we’re going to continue industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have suffered.

Senator Hawley:
You know… why, Mr. Zuckerberg, why should your company not be sued for this? Why is it that you can claim… you hide behind a liability shield… you can’t be held accountable? Shouldn’t you be held accountable personally? Will you take personal responsibility?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, I think I’ve already answered this. I mean, this is… these are serious issues.

Senator Hawley:
Well, try this again. Will you take personal responsibility?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, I view my job and the job of our company as building the best tools that we can to keep our community safe.

Senator Hawley:
Well, you’re failing at that.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, Senator, we’re doing an industry-leading effort. We build AI tools…

Senator Hawley:
Nonsense. Your product is killing people. Will you personally commit to compensating the victims? You’re a billionaire. Will you commit to compensating the victims? Will you set up a compensation fund?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, I think these are… these are…

Senator Hawley:
With your money.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, these are complicated…

Senator Hawley:
Yes, no, that’s not a complicated question. Yes or no… will you set up a victims’ compensation fund with your money? The money you made on these families sitting behind you… yes or no?

Mark Zuckerberg:
Senator, I don’t think that that’s… my job is to make sure we build good tools. My job is to make sure that…

Senator Hawley:
Your job is to be responsible for what your company has done. You’ve made billions of dollars on the people sitting behind you here. You’ve done nothing to help them. You’ve done nothing to compensate them. You’ve done nothing to put it right. You could do so here today… and you should. You should, Mr. Zuckerberg.