During a controversial hearing of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that took place this Wednesday, the executive director of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has been pressured to turn around and look families in the face of children who have been harmed by social media companies like yours.
This dramatic moment has been motivated by questions from Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who has been one of the politicians in charge of questioning the five social media managers called to testify at the hearing, among whom were the CEOs of Snap (the matrix Snapchat), DiscordX (the social network formerly known as Twitter), TikTok and Zuckerberg himself.
Hawley asked the Facebook co-founder if he had ever apologized to families who were victims of abuse on social networks, alleging that the services offered by Facebook’s parent company, Instagram and WhatsApp “are killing people.”
He then asked Zuckerberg if he would like to apologize directly to the families who attended the hearing whose children had been harmed or died due to the impact of social media.
The executive director of Meta stood up, looked at the families who had come as witnesses at the hearing and said: “No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and that is why we have invested so much.”
Families held photos of their children in the air as Zuckerberg addressed them.
Several parents whose children have been affected by the mala praxis of social media companies had attended the US Senate hearing as an audience, according to reports NBC Newsincluding Tony Roberts, who stated that His daughter had committed suicide after seeing a simulated hanging on social networks.
“The bottom line is that we will never have what we want most in this life: our daughter back. That’s why we’re here, advocating for change,” Roberts told NBC News.
During the session, many US senators have proposed eliminate the legal protections that companies have of social networks, which would mean that they could be sued for child pornography or sexually explicit material hosted on their platforms.