Crooked Media - What A Day: Delete your accountability

- Jesse Waters saying this with a straight face on…Fox News

Congress once again hauled in a group of tech tycoons to answer for the chaos their platforms have wrought on our society. 
 

• The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about online child safety on Wednesday, and it was full of tense exchanges between members of Congress and tech executives. Senators from both parties aggressively questioned Meta CEO and founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, and demanded that he and executives of X (Twitter), TikTok, Discord, and Snap take responsibility for the role of their platforms in harming children. At one point, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) pressured Zuckerberg to apologize for the harm his platforms have caused. The tech tycoon stood up, turned around and addressed the families of victims who had suffered abuse on Meta’s platforms sitting in the audience. “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg told them. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered.”
   

• Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Sou Chew took the most heat. Both were grilled on the number of incidents of abuse that have occurred across their platforms. Lawmakers also discussed a bipartisan proposal, the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require online services like social media networks to take “responsible measures” to prevent harm to children, including bullying, harassment, sexual exploitation, promotion of anorexia, self-harm, and predatory marketing. The measure would also require such services to activate the highest privacy and safety settings by default for any users under 18. Two of the tech CEOs in question, Snap’s Evan Spiegel and X’s Linda Yaccarino, agreed to support KOSA, while Zuckerberg, Chew, and Discord CEO Jason Citron did not, saying it contains overly-broad restrictions that may conflict with free speech.
   

• The bipartisan desire to be seen as tough on Big Tech dovetailed with the desire to be seen as tough on China, when it came to questioning Sou Chew. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and many (mainly conservative) lawmakers have repeatedly sought to curb the app’s influence in the United States because of its ties to China. Chew is from Singapore and still lives there, which some Republicans were not able to wrap their heads around. In particular, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) would not let it go and kept making oblique accusations that Chew was affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) the Judiciary's top Republican, told Mark Zuckerberg in today’s hearing, “You have blood on your hands,” echoing remarks made by President Biden two years ago when he accused the social media platforms of spreading COVID vaccine misinformation. If nothing else, it’s nice to see our reigning political parties come together to yell at our social media overlords!

Tomorrow, February 1st, Strict Scrutiny host Leah Litman will be on the Friends of the Pod Discord at 12:30pm PT for a round of Ask Me Anything. If you're around, come join the conversation! Ask her something good. Probably not legal advice though. Not a member? Head to crooked.com/friends to sign up.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) to be permanently shuttered on Wednesday after Israel accused a dozen members of its 13,000-person staff of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attacks. Palestinians have accused Israel of falsifying these claims to tarnish UNRWA, which was established to help refugees displaced by Israel’s founding in 1948. More than half of Gaza’s population looks to UNRWA for day-to-day assistance, and it functioned almost like a state would even before the war erupted. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described UNRWA as “the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza,” and pleaded with the international community to “guarantee the continuity of UNRWA’s lifesaving work.” 

The organization’s largest donor, the United States, has paused funding pending the results of an investigation, a devastating blow to Gazans who are already facing full-scale famine in the enclave. Increasingly, people there have reported resorting to drinking polluted water, eating grass, and even animal feed to survive. The United Nations Human Rights Commission warned that “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people,” and that “every single person in Gaza is hungry.” 

Militant group Hamas is currently studying the three-phase truce proposed by Israel that was developed with allied mediators like the United States last week. Even so, civilians are reporting an increase in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City in the north and Khan Younis in the south. Thousands of miles away, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the State Department to conduct a review on possible American and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to Axios. This could take the form of a bilateral recognition, not using a veto to block the UN Security Council from admitting Palestine as a full member, or encouraging other countries to recognize Palestine.

Russia and Ukraine announced the exchange of hundreds of prisoners of war on Wednesday. 

President Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38 percent according to a new Reuters poll, as concerns over immigration (fanned by conservative media) mount. 

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her office’s lead prosecutor in the 2020 election interference case against disgraced former president Donald Trump were subpoenaed on Wednesday to testify regarding allegations of an inappropriate romantic relationship. 

The International Court of Justice found that Russia violated elements of a United Nations anti-terrorism treaty, but declined to rule on allegations that the country was responsible for shooting down a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in 2014. 

Right-wing activist Christofer Rufo, who led the charge to oust former Harvard president Claudine Gay (who is Black), has links recommending a “race science” (scientific racism) journal in his newsletter. What a shock!

A 32-year-old Pennsylvania man named Justin Mohn was arrested after allegedly killing and decapitating his father, and then displaying his head in a gruesome YouTube video in which he spouted right-wing conspiracy theories. He was charged with first degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and possessing an instrument of crime with intent. 

The House passed a bipartisan tax bill that would help millions of Americans through the expansion of the Child Tax Credit and low-income housing assistance, sending it to the Senate. (Iit also has tax breaks for businesses, which is how they got the GOP on board.).  But some Republican lawmakers are expressing reluctance to push it over the finish line because it runs the risk of looking good for President Biden. 

Seven years ago, the NFL settled with former players who have suffered from dementia and CTE and their families, but a Washington Post investigation found that the settlement requires more impairment than the standard definition of dementia used in most U.S. diagnoses. This, coupled with other factors designed by the NFL, has led to hundreds of former players diagnosed with dementia—including many who died with CTE— being denied settlement compensation. 

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The Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates on Wednesday, and central bankers indicated they may cut rates in the coming months for the first time since 2020. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump has spent almost $30 million in donor contributions on his personal legal fees…in just the past six months. His PAC spent about $50 million on the big guy’s legal fees in 2023. 

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) fundraising numbers are way down as the deadline for re-election nears, perhaps because Arizonans have seen through her bullshit? Relatedly, Ruben Gallego is doing great.