The Senate Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas to the CEOs of the social media companies Discord, Snap and X, formerly Twitter, compelling them to testify on Dec. 6 during a hearing about online child sexual exploitation, which the committee calls a crisis. The Committee also wants to hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Chew, but they are in talks to testify voluntarily.
The bipartisan subpoena is part of an effort to pass new legislation to protect kids online.
“We promised Big Tech that they’d have their chance to explain their failures to protect kids. Now’s that chance,” Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a joint statement. “Big Tech’s failure to police itself at the expense of our kids cannot go unanswered.”
During the hearing, it’s likely Mark Zuckerberg will be grilled on Meta’s use of end-to-end encryption.
In an explanation of its purpose, the company said, “The content of your messages and calls in end-to-end encrypted conversations is protected from the moment it leaves your device to the moment it reaches the receiver’s device. This means that nobody else can see or listen to what’s sent or said – not even Meta.”
Zuckerberg has been questioned about this before and once admitted encryption makes it harder to catch predators.
“You’re right that in an end-to-end encrypted world, one of the risks that I’m worried about among others, to safety, is that it will be harder to find some of this behavior,” Zuckerberg told the House Financial Services Committee during a 2019 hearing.
Meta subsidiary WhatsApp tried to push back on the notion that encryption is all bad by releasing a documentary that showed how an Afghan women’s soccer team used its encrypted messaging service to escape the Taliban after it took over the country in 2021.
The ACLU supports encryption for privacy reasons.
“End-to-end encryption is the best protection, offering individuals the assurance that their personal data are shielded from prying eyes,” the organization said.
The Judiciary Committee has five bills it’s trying to get passed into law: the STOP CSAM Act, EARN IT Act, SHIELD Act, Project Safe Childhood Act, and REPORT Act.
The EARN IT Act would remove big tech’s blanket immunity from civil and criminal liability and the SHIELD Act would create greater federal criminal liability for those who share private, sexually explicit photos without consent.
