While questioning Zuckerberg under oath, Senator Hawley asked Zuckerberg if he would like to apologize to the families of the victims in attendance at the hearing.
Zuckerberg took Halwey up on the request and apologized to the families.
The CEO of Meta stated, “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through.”
He continued, “Nobody should have to go through what your families have suffered. This is why we have invested so much and are going to continue industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have suffered.”
WATCH
Per CNN:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood to apologize to the families present at the Senate hearing, saying he was sorry for “the things that your families have suffered.”
“This is why we’ve invested so much … to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have gone through,” he added.
In response, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley called on Zuckerberg, as a billionaire, to “compensate” the families whose children have been affected by his platforms.
It can be recalled that New Mexico Democrat Attorney General Raúl Torrez took decisive action against tech giant Meta Platforms, Inc., its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and associated entities, including Instagram, LLC and Facebook Holdings, LLC.
The lawsuit, filed last year, represents a bold effort to curb the exploitation of children on social media platforms.
“Our investigation into Meta’s social media platforms demonstrates that they are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex,” Attorney General Torrez said in a statement.
“As a career prosecutor who specialized in internet crimes against children, I am committed to using every available tool to put an end to these horrific practices and I will hold companies — and their executives — accountable whenever they put profits ahead of children’s safety,” he added.
During the past several months, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office launched an undercover operation posing as minors under 14 on Meta’s platforms. This sting operation led to disturbing findings, where it was discovered that:
- Proactively served and directed the underage users a stream of egregious, sexually explicit images — even when the child has expressed no interest in this content
- Enabled dozens of adults to find, contact, and press children into providing sexually explicit pictures of themselves or participate in pornographic videos.
- Recommended that the children join unmoderated Facebook groups devoted to facilitating commercial sex.
- Allowed Facebook and Instagram users to find, share, and sell an enormous volume of child pornography.
- Allowed a fictitious mother to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.
Recent findings have exposed a network of Instagram accounts purportedly offering illicit means to acquire or exchange Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and Child Sexual Exploitation Content (CSEC).
Investigations reveal that these accounts provide instructions to move conversations to offline mediums such as WhatsApp or Telegram, platforms that offer end-to-end encryption and are beyond the reach of routine monitoring.
According to the complaint, “A search for ‘All New Kids Links Available’ on Instagram, for example, yielded dozens of options for CSAM. Notably, ‘cheese pizza,’ with its shared initials, is known to be a proxy for child pornography.”
