The Facebook Testimony Shows How Congress Is Out of Touch With American Life
Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.
On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate on Facebook’s handling of personal data. The marathon session hinged largely on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political data firm hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign harvested account information for targeted political ads. Zuckerberg’s testimony, which continued in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, was intended to help Congress determine what regulation, if any, might be needed to protect both the security of the American people’s personal information and the sanctity of future elections. But it quickly became clear that Congress members had little more working knowledge of the platform than my late grandmother, who refused to buy a computer, and stubbornly insisted that Zuckerberg’s social platform was called “Book of Faces.” That’s cute and funny, because my grandma was not responsible for authoring public policy.
Perhaps because of Facebook’s prominence in pop culture, and our collective awareness of Zuckerberg’s story as it was told in The Social Network, the testimony was evaluated as if it were entertainment. Coverage of the session so centered around Zuckerberg as a character that there were entire articles dedicated to his suit choice, and also multiple supercuts of him saying the word "senator" a lot. In other analyses, he was both criticized for being evasive and praised for being extensively prepared. Overall, the general takeaway seemed to be that the leader of the tech giant emerged “unscathed.” If only the same could be said for the 2016 election. One story published by CNN ahead of the Capitol Hill session went so far as to declare this Zuckerberg’s “growing up moment,” as if the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company ought to be held to the standards of a teen boy studying for his bar mitzvah. In this shameful, softball handling of Facebook's founder, there was another important performance sorely lacking in scrutiny: that of the senators asking the questions.
Throughout the session, the Senate collectively demonstrated a glaring inability to understand Facebook. Orrin Hatch literally furrowed his brow as he asked Zuckerberg how he sustains a business model with no paid subscriptions and Brian Schatz’s question about “emailing within WhatsApp” may have caused a few people to scratch their heads. (Members of the House of Representatives were perceived as having done a slightly better job.) Any effort that might have gone toward grilling the tech giant on his commitment to security was squandered by expressing cluelessness about how it all works in the first place. There was quite a bit of age-related commentary in this regard — and, truly, our need for more young people in office has rarely been more painfully obvious than while watching Zuckerberg explain the Internet to a group whose average age is 61. Except, outside of lazy jokes, age is not a legitimate barrier for understanding social media use, and even if it was, the reality is that understanding the prevailing method of American communication is their job.
It is hard to overstate the role of the internet in American life. Social media is now the core site of our national dialogue, and Facebook is our most prominent platform. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans use it. How, then, is it even remotely acceptable for our representatives to be so out of touch with how it works?
It’s worth noting that our elected officials are not experts in many of the things they legislate on. Writing for The New York Times, Kevin Roose detailed the way in which lawmakers’ apparent inability to comprehend the platform reflects a lack of political will to change the system as it stands. “It’s tempting to claim that technological illiteracy is the problem,” he writes, except, “Congress typically does not require subject matter expertise of its members.” He offers as a key example the 2009 congressional hearings in which Wall Street executives testified on mortgage-backed securities. The nuances of the economic crisis required more technical knowledge than figuring out how a social media platform works, and yet members of Congress were capable of crafting questions and enacting policy to regulate the financial sector. Ignorance is simply not a reasonable excuse here.
The job of our representatives is to equip themselves with the tools to understand this subject matter so that they may craft public policy. In terms of the factors that brought Zuckerberg to Washington, regulation might address the ways data from users is collected and shared, the proliferation of hate speech on the platform, or Facebook’s seeming monopoly over our social media communications. These are three separate areas of legislation, each in need of separate reform considerations. Instead of working to unpack what might be done in these sectors of concern, the Senate bumbled through overly generalized inquiry with the general finesse of Derek Zoolander trying to get at the files inside the computer.
It is absolutely absurd that solutions are being framed as an impossibility because “Congress just doesn’t get it.” Every session they have to do their best to understand far more complicated things than Facebook.com. Furthermore, the prevalence of the platform in the lives of their constituents makes it even more unacceptable that they have failed to develop an adequate knowledge. An average age of 61 is not a reasonable excuse, and is even a bit ageist, when you really get down to it. This is the most crucial takeaway of Zuckerberg’s testimony, miraculously buried in the media examining him with less critical rigor than was afforded to Jesse Eisenberg’s big-screen portrayal.
Hearings like this make it seem as though our representatives are out of touch with their sole responsibility: understanding the lives of their constituents. Once again, we are faced with the ailing health of our democracy, in which our elected officials are shamelessly disconnected from those they represent. This testimony was a disgraceful display, in which not only Zuckerberg, but the entirety of the Senate, has emerged “unscathed.” The total lack of responsibility here should be dispiriting, but it is not hopeless. The solution remains, as always, in our collective power. We need greater accountability and recallability in order to make this glaring disconnect unacceptable. Until we can come together to build our individual civic participation into a more well-informed and active electorate, our representatives will continue pretending that the work of representation is just too tough for them to understand.
Related: If You’re Deleting Your Facebook Over Data Concerns, You’ll Have to Delete Instagram Too
