Senate Judiciary Committee Plans Hearing on Online Child Exploitation
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has announced that it will be holding a hearing on online child sexual exploitation on Dec. 6. The committee expects Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to testify voluntarily at the hearing.
In addition to this, the committee has issued subpoenas to the CEOs of Discord, Snap, and X (formerly known as Twitter) to compel them to testify at the hearing.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin and its top Republican Lindsey Graham have expressed their intention to use the hearing as an opportunity to question the CEOs of some of the largest social media companies about their failures to protect children online.
“Big Tech’s failure to police itself at the expense of our kids cannot go unanswered,” said Durbin and Graham in a joint statement. “Hearing from the CEOs of some of the world’s largest social media companies will help inform the Committee’s efforts to address the crisis of online child sexual exploitation.”
The committee highlighted that Discord and X had refused to cooperate by accepting service of the subpoenas on behalf of their CEOs, which led the committee to enlist the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service to personally serve the subpoenas in a departure from standard practice.
(Reporting by David Shepardson, Jasper Ward and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Chizu Nomiyama)
