Senate hearing highlights: Lawmakers grill CEOs from TikTok, X and Meta about online child safety

They barely even need to alter Section 230. What they need to do is actually enforce it.

The protections Section 230 gives to websites are lost when the website fails to act. These websites have failed to act - as demonstrated by the people who gave their accounts of what happened at the start of the video. The websites can be sued, they can be penalised, but that isn't happening.

The government won't admit they also have responsibility for the failures here. Instead, they're turning this into an opportunity to repeal legislation that is essential to how the internet functions, all so that they can better control the narratives online.

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be, I've listened to a bit (Cotton's testimony starts around 2:20:50 in the linked video, citizenship bullshit comes up around 2:23:45) and Cotton asks the TikTok CEO what nation he's a citizen of, if he's ever applied for Chinese citizenship, does he have a Singaporean passport, does he have any other passports, if his wife and children are American citizens, if he's ever applied for American citzenship, if hes ever been a member of the Chinese communist party, and if he's ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese communist party, before launching off into questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the genocide of Uyghurs, but no mention of Japan or Korea that I heard

Still pretty jaw dropping racism by Cotton to ask the Asian guy over and over and over whether he's an agent of the Chinese Communist Party but never ask anyone else up there about that

Unfortunately yes. These are the kind of people that make laws about social networks.

Shit like this is why I can't take the handwringing over Tiktok seriously. Yeah, their company work culture sucks, and social media in general sucks. But so much of the hate toward Tiktok is tinged with xenophobia that it's unreal.

the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP

That deserves some context

TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

Although ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government.

TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies.

In November last year, the chair of ByteDance—the company's co-founder Zhang Yiming—stepped down; a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China's tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.

ByteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.

But the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP "is mistaken... a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok's parent company."

I can’t speak for anyone else. I’m just tired. Tired of an endless circus that never seems to result in meaningful progress, change, or a sense that the good guys are winning. I don’t mean to seem defeatist but I feel defeated.

The problem was that their bipartisan support was for the increased mass surveillance of the internet. How do you enforce something like an age restriction unless you have ID databases with the government?

Honestly I thought it was a rerun of the first time they grilled Zuckerberg from the thumbnail. Didn't expect Discord and Snapchat to show up.

Excited to see what comes out of this though, although I wouldn't say I have high hopes of positive change happening.