The Morning Briefing: Congress Needs to Slay Big Tech’s 3-Headed Monster
I feel like we have been here before when it comes to Big Tech overreach.
Oh wait, that’s because we have.
Twitter CEO Jack “Great Rasputin’s Beard” Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark “Bowl Cut” Zuckerberg were back for another virtual get-together with some senators again on Tuesday, this time in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
I am beginning to lose count, but I know that this is at least the third time since the summer that members of Congress and the CEOs have staged one of these political kabuki theater performances. The pattern is familiar: Zuckerberg doesn’t remember much, Dorsey shows up stoned but with plenty of stalling, sometimes nonsensical answers. Then Ted Cruz ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS them, which makes for some good blog traffic.
After that, the Jack and Zuck show gets back to business as usual.
Tyler covered yesterday’s latest “Cruz vs Dorsey” moment:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to task over his company’s suppression of the bombshell New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s emails linking Joe Biden to his son’s notorious business deals. In a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Cruz pressed Dorsey on how Twitter could possibly claim not to be a publisher when it selectively applied its hacked materials policy against the Biden story but not against the New York Times article on Trump’s tax returns.
Cruz is also a member of the Commerce Committee, so he and Dorsey had pretty much this same conversation three weeks ago. The difference between now and then is…nothing. OK, the election happened and we got to see that Twitter and Facebook probably did help Biden a lot, but nothing has really changed for Twitter, Facebook, and Google. As I wrote at the end of last month, Dorsey and Zuckerberg (and occasionally Google’s Sundar Pichai) keep showing up for these dog and pony shows because they know that they’re largely untouchable.
All they have to do is show up for an or two of tongue-lashings, then retreat to their billionaire enclaves and continue doing whatever the hell they want to do.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri got in on the action yesterday, saying that he had evidence that Twitter, Facebook, and Google were engaged in some censorship collusion. Hawley took to Twitter afterwards to complain about Zuckerberg’s evasiveness and this reply to it was perfect:
Nothing concrete will happen unless Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is altered. As the Wall Street Journal explains, most agree that it needs to be updated, but there isn’t much agreement on what the update should involve.
Until that is figured out, the charade will continue. The Big Three will continue censoring conservative voices and — if the the Republicans keep the Senate — they will occasionally be summoned for a good talking-to.
In my headline today I said that Congress needs to slay the Big Three. “Neuter” would have been a better word, perhaps.
Stop the theater though. Its ineffectiveness is becoming rather embarrassing at this point.
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