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Social media head honchos will testify regarding online child sexual exploitation at a U.S. Senate hearing rescheduled for Jan. 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hear from:
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (NASDAQ:META)
- Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X (formerly Twitter)
- Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok (BDNCE)
- Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap (NYSE:SNAP)
- Jason Citron, CEO of Discord
The CEOs of X, Discord and Snap (SNAP) after being subpoenaed following repeated refusals over weeks of negotiations to testify. The CEOs of Meta (META) and TikTok voluntarily agreed to testify at the hearing.
“Now that all five companies are cooperating, we look forward to hearing from their CEOs,” the panel’s Democratic chairman and the Republican ranking member, Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham, said in a statement.
The committee said the tech companies had previously complained that they had not been invited to the first hearing. However, upon being invited to this hearing, some companies refused to make their CEOs available.
“Several companies initially refused to accept a subpoena. The U.S. Marshals Service even attempted to serve the subpoena at Discord’s office,” Durbin and Graham added. “We’ve known from the beginning that our efforts to protect children online would be met with hesitation from Big Tech. They finally are being forced to acknowledge their failures when it comes to protecting kids.”
