Scott Tibbs
Josh Hawley's preening and grandstanding about social media
By Scott Tibbs, February 9, 2024
Facebook is, by far, the biggest social media company. Facebook moderators have to sift through an enormous amount of filth, including graphic and sexually explicit content. Exposure to this stuff for hour after hour, day after day, and month after month is traumatizing and has led many moderators to develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A
simple search will bring up a number of articles about this. Facebook and other tech companies remove illegal content, identify predators and work with law enforcement to get those people prosecuted.
Obviously, this is not to minimize the heinousness of some of the terrible things posted to social media. That absolutely needs to be taken down and reported to law enforcement when laws have been broken. I am also not going to pretend that the moderation policies of social media giants are perfect, or that the implementation of those policies is perfect. There are many flaws that need to be addressed, and there is always more content to be taken down and there are more crimes to be prosecuted.
But Senator Josh Hawley is pretending that all of this is black and white. He berated and yelled at Mark Zuckerberg for the content on Instagram
that violates the network's terms of service, demanding that Zuckerberg reveal who he fired over the content slipping through. There is no compassion for the mental and emotional toll moderating these sites takes on the employees. He demands that people be fired and publicly shamed for doing an imperfect job.
By Hawley's logic, there are a number of police officers and security personnel who need to be fired for not preventing Senate staffers from sodomizing each other in a Senate hearing room, filming it and posting the video online. Is it that difficult to lock the door so people do not gain unauthorized access? Who did YOU fire, Senator Hawley? Are you going to apologize to the people unwittingly exposed to this filth filmed where you serve the public at taxpayer expense?
Now, Senator Hawley is not a stupid man. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2006. He is 6 years younger than I am, so he is likely at least as tech-savvy as I am. So while Hawley himself is not stupid, he apparently thinks that the people viewing the hearing are stupid, or are at least not well-versed on the difficulty of moderating posts that are shared by Facebook's
three billion users every day. This is why Hawley's preening and grandstanding is worse than ignorant. It is dishonest. Hawley is intentionally lying to his constituents and the nation at large with his context-free attacks on social media. He beclowned himself, and he needs to apologize for his deplorable behavior.
Opinion Archives
E-mail Scott
Scott's Links
About the Author
ConservaTibbs.com