‘I am sorry’: Hawley gets Zuckerberg to apologize for youth sexually exploited online

Sen. Josh Hawley on Wednesday asked Facebook leader and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg to apologize to the families of young Americans who were harmed or died by suicide after online child sexual exploitation on social media.

In a heated exchange during a U.S. Senate hearing, Hawley, a Missouri Republican, asked Zuckerburg if he had taken any action to fire employees, provide compensation to victims or apologize to the families of people who were harmed by posts on social media sites.

Zuckerburg then stood up, turned to an audience holding up pictures of their loved ones, and apologized.

“I am sorry for everything that you have gone through,” Zuckerburg said. “It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things your family has suffered. And this is why we invested so much and will continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have had to suffer.”

Hawley then asked Zuckerburg, who was trying to explain steps Meta has taken to offer more protection for children and to hand more power to parents, whether he plans to set up a victim compensation fund for people harmed by his sites.

“Your job is to be responsible for what your company has done,” Hawley said. “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.”

The exchange came in the middle of a high-profile hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the CEOs of TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, X and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram gathered for a series of scoldings by both Democratic and Republican senators over the technology companies’ inability to better police social media sites for hosting content that harms children.

“For all the upsides, the dark side is too great to deal with,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee. “We do not need to live like this in America.”

The Judiciary Committee has passed several bills aimed at increasing protections for children who use social media, particularly when it comes to child sexual exploitation. In particular, the bills take aim at Section 230, the 1996 law that gives social media companies blanket protection from lawsuits over content hosted on their sites.

None of the CEOs expressed support for all five bipartisan bills the Judiciary Committee has passed in an effort to address child sexual exploitation online, and to offer victims the ability to hold social media companies accountable.

Some of the CEOs expressed support for individual bills, including the Cooper Davis Act, which would create standards requiring social media companies to report any information they have on someone who illegally provides drugs on their platform to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, and named for a 16-year-old Kansan who died by a drug overdose after taking a pill laced with fentanyl that he purchased on Snapchat.

Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, said he supports the bill because he thinks it would empower the DEA to cut down on drug trafficking.

But while the Judiciary has been able to pass several pieces of legislation through committee with the support of hard-line Republicans and liberal Democrats, none of the bills have received a vote on the Senate floor.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, has expressed support for passing legislation to regulate generative artificial intelligence, but efforts to increase regulations on social media companies have fallen flat.

Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that he hopes that will change, saying he wanted the hearing to be a “call to action.”

Graham, the South Carolina Republican, took it a step farther.

“Mr. Zuckerburg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean to, but you have blood on your hands,” Graham said.