Why Mark Zuckerberg Apologized in the January Senate Hearing

CEOs of major SNS companies including Meta, X(Twitter), and TikTok were summoned to the US Senate on January 31, 2024. The members of the Senate “scolded” those tech companies leaders for online child sexual exploitation. In this hearing, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, lowered his head to apologize for the child sexual exploitation that happened in Meta (Al Jazeera, 2024). The hearing of those CEOs of major SNS companies was fully valid; some people even assess the hearing of them was too late even though there were a lot of cases of sexual assault existing in these SNS companies. 

Cases of sexual assault reported were astonishing since these SNSs started to receive a lot of users. In many countries, sexual assault cases, especially those targeted at teenagers and children, have become a serious social issue that all citizens focus on. For example, in South Korea, the groups of criminals operating the group chat that shares videos of sexually assaulted girls and boys were restrained and became a hot topic since some of them received a sentence of more than 40 years(조선일보, 2023).

 Also, X(Twitter)’s censorship policy is known to be too loose for uploading sexually provocative videos (박고은, 2023). Therefore, a lot of videos including those of sexually assaulting children are uploaded to X(Twitter) and shared and watched by users all around the world. Because of those incidents and tendencies, many people are raging at those tech companies for not actively preventing those terrible cases from happening. It became evident that those SNS companies lost their ability to " self-purify.”

When a serious social issue caused by corporations is not resolved well by themselves, a national institution needs to act in order to make a change. A national institution, representatively the national assembly, has a system to accuse those who are responsible for social issues and it is totally rational to use the system to urge and scold those who are responsible. With this logic, the hearing of those leaders of SNS companies is totally valid and righteous. It is a good example that the Senate uses its power to urge. 

The righteous decision of the Senate to hold the hearing of those SNS company leaders is highly valid and deserves praise. The apology of Mark Zuckerberg was a good decision for the victims and his company. Many people would hope sexually assaulting videos on SNSs shouldn’t be uploaded anymore. I hope those tech companies reflect on their policies more and more. I hope that the companies will solve the problem on their own so that the Senate will not hold the hearing again.