THE TABLEAU IS VERY RESONANT. It echoes infamous episodes from an earlier time. Chief Executive Officers of big corporations are lined up, all being sworn in, hands raised solemnly, and then being called to account by our country’s elected representatives.  

In history, it was chiefs of the tobacco industry who were charged with destroying the nation’s health – the world’s health really – with their product. And history has fully recorded how they first denied any harm, then variously obfuscated, evaded and at times even came eventually to admit the truth.

This week it’s been leaders of the tech industry called to account, before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee – in what journalists have been calling the chamber’s highest-profile hearing on the issue to date. They stood charged with posing various grave dangers to the public, this time especially young people, through the companies’ sheer irresponsibility and recklessness, — oh, and financial greed too, of course.

Some flavor of the event was set by ranking member Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, who (it should be noted) can sometimes get over-excitable. He berated the chiefs, saying “you have blood on your hands.”

The hearing was the first one to be summoning the company X, (formerly known as Twitter) since Elon Musk bought it and changed its name – and of course decimated its ranks of so-called ‘moderation’ teams … staff and contractors who were supposed to moderate toxic or dangerous digital content. For this company, a subpoena was deemed necessary by the Committee, in view of what Senators saw as a lack of cooperation so far from the platform. But it wasn’t Musk who showed up to face questions and Senatorial reprimands – it was the fairly recently appointed chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, she of NBC Universal previously, where she led the launching of the Peacock streaming platform.

With her representing X, we were at least spared a meet-up between Musk and his fellow-giant Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (or Facebook) in the strange, you might say ridiculous atmosphere that’s come to prevail between the two men. This is in the wake of that much-publicized spat of theirs. Were they, were they not, going to stage an actual cage-fight? After several months of them trash-talking each other across the ether, the whole idea seems to have petered out – leaving just the residual suspicion that it was the older man, Musk who was finally the faint-heart, albeit in a ‘plausible deniability’ kind of way.

Anyway, in the much more august setting of the US Capitol — nary a fight-cage in sight — a lot of Senatorial grilling went on   for the five CEOs in total. And after four hours Senate Majority Whip (and chair of the Committee) Dick Durbin gaveled it all to a close. And the best journalistic summary I can offer is one that several close observers concluded: The social media companies successfully avoided making any specific promises to change their ways.

BEHIND THE HEARING LIES a not-fully-reported set of revelations that I’d say are worth much more attention. What’s been labeled a dirty little secret in the industry has been highlighted by a sort of whistle-blower from Zuckerberg’s Meta. It’s not so little, I would add in correction. And I carefully say he’s a sort-of whistler-blower, because he is no longer inside Meta blowing a whistle, but is now outside as a freelance tech companies’ adviser.

But he was Director of Responsible Innovation (nice title, huh?) for Facebook, and then for the overarching entity, Meta, and his name is Zvika Krieger (right). What he has had to report about Meta concerns the matter of its parental controls.

Meta has said that these controls “make it simpler for parents to shape their teens’ online experiences.” We’re talking here specifically about Instagram, which is a more popular Meta-owned platform among teens than Facebook, which seems to skew older and older every day now. Well … those controls might make things easier for parents to have a say in their children’s lives online – but not of course if they don’t use them. And the uncomfortable truth turns out to be that fewer than ten percent of teens’ parents are taking up the controls, and activating them.

This matter of parental intervention has eventually, in just the last couple of years, zoomed to top-of-mind across the social media industry as a whole. It couldn’t fail to, while concern has been escalating about kids becoming targets of predators, as well as being exposed to toxic content. Meta provided its parental supervision tool on Instagram, in March 2022, and Snapchat, or just Snap quickly followed suit.

And Discord, another company that had to be subpoena-ed to appear in the Senate, had previously condemned  tools for parental supervision, but it suddenly reversed itself and launched some controls last year. This was after Discord was catapulted unwillingly into the news, because a young, barely out-of-his-teens, member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard chose Discord as the place to leak highly classified defense and intelligence documents.

But – and the but looms large for all these platforms – what’s the use of parental controls if parents cannot, say, find them, or easily opt for using them. They’re far from userfriendly to navigate to … almost the complete opposite of a default setting. In the words of Mr Krieger, the ex-Meta executive who has been raising red flags as well as blowing his whistle:

[the controls] “do little to protect users. Unless, that is, restrictive settings are the default, which most are not. The dirty secret about parental controls [there’s that phrase again] is that the vast majority of parents just don’t use them.

Various lawsuits in recent months have repeatedly been revealing that Kreiger’s concerns, and those of other (often very senior) staff at Meta, were brushed aside by the executive chairman, Mr Zuckerberg.