2,568 Days
Google cleaned up its act. Zuckerberg didn't. Congress didn't care about either.
First, let me direct your attention to Jim Acosta’s post about the WH correspondents dinner. The event was sickening. But as he pointed out, there were journalists there that had a job to do. To report. The others reveling in trump’s bullshit deserved all the scorn they are now getting.
And now on to today’s topic.
2,568 days—that’s how long it’s been since the time I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to today.
It started with videos of Alison’s murder, which at that point had proliferated on YouTube. With help from Georgetown University Law, we asked repeatedly that they remove the content. We even had a teleconference with the then-head of YouTube and their attorney, assuring us that it had all been removed. It was easy to call bullshit. We had the receipts, which left them flummoxed for a response. The only one they had was to invite me to participate as a content moderator, which I accepted. Except it never materialized, as I suspected it wouldn’t.
A year or two later (it all runs together thanks to their stonewalling), I was invited to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google’s cavalier behavior. When they got wind that I was going to appear, they suddenly found Jesus and wanted to help. It was a naked move to encourage me not to speak. We said thanks, but no thanks, and I stated my case, along with four other experts supporting my claims that Google had no interest in doing the right thing.
Ted Cruz, hoping to score some points, dragged Google’s chief Washington lobbyist in to address the platform’s failure to police violent content on YouTube—content that was, of course, counter to their “terms of service,” which they stated wasn’t allowed. Except it was. A lot.
When Senator Hirono asked the lobbyist directly whether the videos of Alison had been removed, he said yes, they had. Under oath. He lied. I wanted to leap out of my chair and throttle him. The second his testimony ended—before mine had even begun—he literally ran out of the chamber. I caught up with him in the hallway and told him he was a lying POS.
Eric recently checked back on the videos we referenced at that hearing seven years ago. They’ve mostly come down. I don’t know why—maybe they simply lost their shock value as worse content flooded in behind them.
The same can’t be said for Meta. That content is still there, still circulating. While Google appears to have cleaned up its act, Zuckerberg has doubled down—horrific content, child exploitation, all of it. Even a humiliating appearance before the Senate on the KOSA hearing hasn’t moved him to do the right thing.
I despise Donald Trump. But he’s Jesus H. Christ compared to the psychopath Zuckerberg.
That was seven years ago. But the hearings surrounding the issue of online harm delivered by platforms like Google, X, and Meta started even before Alison’s murder. Here’s a list that my colleague Eric put together. I found it astonishing.
