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Comment by spfink | Hacker News Reader

The problem with tech hearings, and generally most hearings with subjects at all related to engineering/science/math, is that Congress is old and actually trending older on average (at least as of 2018, we'll see soon this cycle).

The hearing yesterday was always going to just be a political show due to the current election but remember back to Zuck in 2018 regarding Cambridge Analytica or earlier this year with Zuck, Bezos and Cook. These congressmen are just clueless about tech entirely and apparently aren't seeking expert help in advance of these hearings.

As a big tech employee myself, I absolutely believe that a lot of these big tech companies should be broken up and I can clearly see things that we are doing that aren't good for the consumer. Congress just isn't asking the right questions and isn't asking for the right information.

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This isn't about tech at all. I agree that Congress is out of touch with many tech challenges, but it doesn't apply to the issue under consideration. You don't need to be tech-savvy to understand or consider the implications of media control over public speech. Society has struggled with this issue since the dawn of mass media. It's fundamentally the same concern we faced with yellow journalism a full century ago, and back to the dawn of man in many ways.

I don't trust our politicians when it comes to complicated tech issues. I may not agree with how they handle current social media issues. But I don't think tech ignorance is limiting their understanding of this issue. It's a social issue and a media issue. It's not a tech issue.

Yes and no? Is there not an argument to be made, particularly here where the focus is Section 230 and mostly just FB/Twitter, that it's such an issue because Congress allowed these tech companies unchecked growth and consolidation? Outside of more typical news (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc), what you see on the internet has come down to the whims of Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. Even Instagram is still just Zuckerberg. There's no room for competitors anymore and I think a large reason for that is Congress's continued inaction.

Yes it's primarily a social and media issue, but the novelty is the impact that technology has on these things.

In short the velocity of everything has increased by many order of magnitude. Anyone can publish anything quickly and share across aggregators instantaneously. The distribution of that data from the major platforms is completely opaque, unlike newspapers or tv which had known distribution and self-evident editorial decisions that apply to the entire audience all at once. In the new world, there can be infinite content and infinite eye balls all seeing different slices of it. It's all done by algorithm and no one except data-savvy internal staff have any idea how many people are seeing what and when.

I agree this can all be explained without much technical depth, but two problems with congress: first is that they are out of touch and still think in terms of the disappearing era of broadcast network news having massive monolithic reach and corresponding journalistic standards and ethics conferred by their unassailable moat of limited media options. Second, you can't legislate this if you can't reason about the second order effects due to the economics of how tech companies are run (ie. editorial in any old-school sense of the word simply does not fit any social media companies unit economics) as well as the information economy (ie. people prefer watching things that confirm their biases, and there are unlimited media options with many young people having no idea what a television schedule is).

They don't need to understand the tech to recognize that there's an issue, but they do need to understand the the tech if they want to have any hope of regulating social media and fixing the issue that they have identified.

They mostly seem to give the impression that Dorsey/Zuckerberg, etc, could just tell their companies to do a thing and then it magically happens.

They at least need to understand the tech well enough to recognize that fair, effective content moderation for billions of people is a more difficult and more complicated problem than any of them have attempted to solve.

I think social media companies could do a better job of being transparent and working to reduce political bias, but I do appreciate the challenge that they are facing.

Many members of Congress are heavily invested in tech (though, that's somewhat a consequence of the bifurcation of the S&P 500 into 'big tech' and everything else, with respect to market capitalization). It is somewhat in their interests as owners to have ineffective hearings.

They are fully capable of getting experts involved before hearings to ensure they ask the right questions-- even if the Congressperson isn't all that technical themselves. And they know this. They aren't unintelligent people.

This isn't about the actual underlying issues. It is theater. It is campaign trail talking points. "I'm tough on Big Tech". Once they leave the hearing they are taken out to dinner by lobbyists and accepting donations to the campaigns. Politics isn't about red vs blue as America has been misled. It is a game where the powerful exploit the weak.

I'm going to swim upstream and say that age, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but complacency and self-satisfaction are. You can be 80 and learn something new if you really want, assuming no mental problems, and you can be 20 and think you know everything there is to know and be resistant to learning.

The subsidiary problem, which can be remedied as long as the people want to learn and think they aren't too good to learn new things, is familiarity: It is hard to know what regulations will mean in a practical sense if you leave all your social media accounts to interns and suddenly have to bootstrap your way up from email all the way to Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram.

Being old can be a handicap when learning about technical fields, but the old have no monopoly on smug, self-satisfied idiocy.

Absolutely, I was referring to age more as it relates to the shape of the world and technology as they grew up rather than purely a hit against mental capacity (though for some members of Congress it's definitely both).

For example, Orrin Hatch asking Zuck in 2018 how they make money makes you assume that he doesn't use Facebook. Pretty sure anyone born in the last 30 years could immediately tell you that it's through selling ads.

The younger generation has grown up as big tech has and has a better understanding of the control and influence of these companies on their day to day lives that the older generation doesn't always understand.

I think age matters not because of technical abilities, but instead because the age group that is active on FB is different from the age group representing them in those hearings.

FB has A LOT of old users.

Let's not be ageist. Congressional leaders can be made aware of and informed on the regulatory and sociological impact of tech...if it was a priority for them.

We DO have a problem of leaders not being well informed on many topics they make laws about. But this is also true for finance, healthcare, foreign policy, and yeah tech.

Sidebar: is there an age limit for ageism?

When people complain about how old congress is, it's not like saying a 50yo can't code. It's more complaining about 75, 80 year olds who live off of name recognition rather than anything they actually do anymore, and some of them are clearly losing it. They could retire and live a great life, nobody's trying to take bread out of their mouth.

Unlike those other topics we still have a culture where they wear their technological illiteracy as a badge of honor.

A lot of the background work is handled by the staff, not by the elected members themselves.

And the staff are typically in their 20s or 30s, and use tech like anyone in their age group.

The elected members may not be great questioners, but the recent antitrust committee report had staff fingerprints all over it.

What questions should be asked in hearings like these, spfink, to illuminate the reasons why big tech companies should be broken up, in a way that might resonate with voters?

Senators Ron Wyden, Maria Cantwell, Orrin Hatch and Mark Warner are extremely tech-savvy.

Parenthetically, Orrin Hatch is no longer a senator since he retired 2 years ago.

I can't comment on whether he was tech-savvy or not.

The inability of congressmen to understand even the most trivial of technology considerations is irrelevant. These are business, so logically follow the money. In almost all cases the areas of concern are dictated by advertising business.

That being said if congress had any teeth at all they could instantly solve this technology problem by simply taking back the legislative protections that allow online advertising to thrive. If any of these companies had to operate without these special protections and thus compete with print media with equivalent protections they would immediately whither away.

There are no special protections because you don't need one to not be sued by someone for a wrong party! If my car is vandalized I don't get to just sue Bill Gates be he is convenient and known!

Your example is absurd because it doesn’t exist.

Section 230 and DMCA are special protections that provide blanket immunity from any lawsuits. The protections intentionally exist to shield service providers but indirectly allow online advertising where it could not exist otherwise, there they are special protections.

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