The White House has stepped in to keep Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai out of the hot seat. Instead of the two most recognizable faces in tech, the heads of Instagram and YouTube will take the chairs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on child safety practices, tentatively set for July 28.
Five people familiar with the situation told Politico about the intervention. The deal was brokered alongside White House support for a legislative package backed by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley called the James T. Woods Act, a bill aimed squarely at online child exploitation.
What the James T. Woods Act actually does
The Act is named after a teenager who was victimized through Instagram. It bundles together several pieces of legislation, including the SAFE Act, the ECCHO Act, and the Stop Sextortion Act.
The package targets sextortion and child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. In plain terms: it stiffens sentences, creates new criminal offenses for coercion and sextortion targeting minors, and gives prosecutors sharper tools to bring these cases.
