Congressional anger at damaging new revelations and a legal action resulting from the
Cambridge Analytica affair have put the
Social Media giant’s founder under renewed pressure
For devotees of C-Span, the public-service media network that covers the US
Congress, Tuesday was an interesting day. The
Senate judiciary subcommittee on competition policy, antitrust and consumer rights held a hearing on the social media companies, which for most purposes meant
Google and Facebook. It was intriguing in several ways. For one thing, the senators were exercised, sceptical and sometimes angered by the evasive cant served up by the corporate executives whom they had summoned. More importantly, the perceptible anger was bipartisan (a rare thing in the current Congress). And lastly, some of the most aggressive questioning of the hapless
Facebook representative came from Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is believed to be PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s preferred candidate for president in 2024. And Thiel is a member of Facebook’s board of directors!
This congressional ire was triggered by a terrific scoop in the Wall Street Journal, which had got its hands on a trove of internal Facebook documents. These exposed the yawning chasm between Facebook’s public versions of its stance on various contentious issues and its internal discussions of them. Specifically, the trove showed that: at least 5.8 million high-profile users had been allowed to avoid the company’s normal enforcement processes; research by
Instagram (owned by Facebook) had revealed the risk the platform poses to teenagers’ mental health (“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls” was one striking phrase); the company knew that its algorithms rewarded outrage; and it had been slow to stop drug cartels and human traffickers from using its platform.