Zuckerberg totally proved me wrong in his testimony to Congress over the last two days. Contrary to what I anticipated in my blog post yesterday (here), he *DID* attempt to explain to Congress things that they (obviously) did not know or understand, he *DID* offer concrete suggestions for policy/legislative change, he *DID* explicitly oppose the exploitative/coercive use of aggregate data, he *DID* support the “opt-in” provision for personal data, he *DID* confirm his opposition to the co-opting of the Facebook platform by law enforcement (incl. DOJ and ICE) to monitor or suppress racial minorities and political dissidents, he *DID* advocate for more regulation and oversight of companies like Facebook, and he *DID* very clearly articulate the manner in which the U.S. is waaaayyyy behind in its thinking about the manner in which social media, data collection, and artificial intelligence might undermine (or improve) our democracy.
And he somehow managed to do all of this in the face of a floundering panel of grossly uninformed, embarrassingly inept, and totally-undeserving-of-their-position elected officials who could only barely manage to pose coherent questions to him.
So, basically ignore a lot of what I said in the post yesterday. I’m writing an update for tomorrow right now.
The Zuckerberg hearings weren’t a Morality Theater after all. They were a master class in democratic thinking, served TO the democratic representatives BY a citizen.
You can watch the whole 6+ hours of hearings here: