European here, I was always confused watching U.S. Senate hearings with social media CEOs having to explain and be almost interrogated and accused of someone’s suicide from supposedly “watching content on the platform”. Why do they need to do that and is it only U.S. thing or does it happen somewhere else?
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It’s kind of a warning.
Keep in mind Senators and other congressmen are elected. People have to vote for them to stay in power. That means if things happen that make people upset, they write letters and bother those congressmen. That makes the congressmen kind of concerned about the things that they’re hearing about the most.
So if a handful of Senators from several different states all hear at the same time that there is extensive harassment on a social network and there have been people driven to suicide, they get kind of scared it’s becoming an issue. They can make laws to regulate what’s happening on social networks.
But they don’t want to do that for a couple of reasons. The first is that kind of thing is unpopular because regulating social networks seems like regulating free speech to a lot of people. The second is because social networks make a lot of money thus spend a lot of money on political campaigns. While the congressmen are worried about what voters think, they’re also very worried about upsetting companies that spend a lot of money in politics.
So they’ll call in the CEO to testify. If the CEO is really stupid they’ll answer the questions in a way that makes it very clear there are major issues and laws need to be made. More often the CEO does at least a mediocre job answering their questions.
To some extent it is theater, but it sends a message to the CEO. It reminds that person the government has the power to regulate their business. If it gets out of hand enough, no matter how much they donate to politics voters are going to want a person who will regulate their business and that will happen. The message they are sending is:
“You need to figure out a way to stop this from happening while still making money. If you do not, we’re going to make laws to stop this from happening and when we do we won’t care if you can still make money.”
Another outcome of this process is the CEO might start talking with the congressmen and propose his own laws for them to pass. Obviously the CEO will propose laws where he can still make money. But the congressmen also like that if the laws pass, they can tell the people who complained that they “did something”.
The hearings are also a win for the congressmen, because “we held a hearing” counts as “doing something” to a lot of people.
I’m not sure this is unique to the US, in my memory the EU has had many hearings with Facebook and several other social media CEOs. I feel like EU regulators probably have Elon Musk’s number memorized by now and know they only have to wait 10 or 15 minutes for him to break a new law.
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