Big Tech needs more oversight and possibly needs to be broken up, but are our out-of-touch government officials the right people for the job? Last week, social media had a field day when Sen. Richard Blumenthal went on a rant about Facebook’s need to commit to ending “Finsta.” Even when Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, tried to explain that “Finsta” isn’t a real program that kids can get a hold of, he doubled down in his assertion that Facebook is wrong for supporting the plague that is Finsta accounts! This isn’t the first time lawmakers made a fool of themselves questioning a tech company in ways that even your 10-year-old neighbor could tell you is ridiculous. So, how can we keep allowing them to make rules about these tech giants when they can’t even piece together what the companies do?
3 times Congress members were dumb about tech
- “Does Google track my movement?!” — When Rep. Ted Poe angrily grilled Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai, about whether or not Google will know he moved over to the left if he has his iPhone in his hand
- “Facebook will always be free.” — When Sen. Orrin Hatch asked Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook keeps running when it’s free, apparently not knowing that the platform has ads
- “How many categories do you store?” — When Sen. Deb Fischer confusingly asked how many data categories Facebook stores of all the categories it collects … What?!
- *BONUS* When Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Zuckerberg “Is Twitter the same as what you do?”
Policing Big Tech
Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon—our biggest tech giants—have all been probed or sued by the U.S. government for anticompetitive and antitrust violations. Each of these companies has an astronomical amount of power in their respective lanes, and when a competitor pops up, it’s usually neutralized pretty quickly. So, the efforts of these lawmakers to stand up for smaller companies and daily users are definitely necessary. But if they continue to show up like this, their efforts will all be in vain.
Is there a solution? Well, maybe we should put together a committee of younger and more tech-savvy Congress members to deal with this situation and leave the out-of-touch people on the sidelines. Or maybe we need age limits in Congress. If you have to ask your grandchildren to make the robot lady talk, maybe you’re too out of touch to be in charge of our tech laws. What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
