The White House reportedly helped Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai avoid facing a difficult Senate hearing on their corporations’ child online protection guidelines.Instead, lower-level company executives will appear at the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The panel’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), agreed to let them testify in return for the Trump administration backing Grassley’s legislative package to combat online child exploitation and digital “sextortion,” Politico reported, citing five sources.The White House provided a statement to the Washington Examiner backing Grassley’s bill as a response to the increased criminal use of digital tools and technologies to cause great harm, especially to children.
“It is perfectly normal to endorse a bipartisan technology bill,” the statement read. “This legislation establishes new criminal offenses to ensure offenders are held fully accountable for the broad range of harms they inflict.”“Chairman Grassley isn’t interested in simply generating clicks and views online like past hearings,” a spokesperson for Grassley told Politico. “He’s working to get lifesaving child safety legislation actually signed into law.”Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri is expected to testify on behalf of Meta, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on behalf of Google. The Washington Examiner asked both companies for comment.The bill in question, known as the James T. Woods Act, is a bipartisan legislative package that makes it a federal crime to distribute child sexual abuse material to blackmail or intimidate minors. It would also direct the U.S. Sentencing Commission to review and update sentencing guidelines.The bill also builds on the Take it Down Act, which requires covered platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate visual depictions.HOUSE REACHES DEAL ON PORNOGRAPHY AGE VERIFICATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA PROTECTIONS FOR MINORSMeta representatives met with the White House about the hearing in late May and early June, according to Politico, and expressed concerns that it would increase negative attention stemming from the child online safety litigation.Top tech executives are expected to testify at a July 28 Senate hearing to discuss major social media companies’ accountability for systemic platform failures regarding online child safety, predatory exploitation, and digital sextortion targeting youth.
