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Comment by san-fran | Hacker News Reader

It’s been a long-held opinion that tech companies laugh at the out-of-touch Congresspeople at these hearings. Recall Mark Zuckerberg’s incredulity when members of Congress had to ask him how Facebook makes money.

And as if that isn’t enough, tech companies are only loyal to their boards of directors, who are only loyal to quarter-over-quarter growth, and nothing else.

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Not saying it’s the case here but a lot of times congress asks these questions as leading questions or to give viewers the full context of follow up questions (or more likely for easy clips).

A hypothetical back and forward might be something like:

“How does Facebook make money?”

“By selling ads.”

“Does Facebook ever target those ads to kids?”

“Yes”

“So is it in facebook’s financial interest for kids to spend as much time as possible on the platform?”

Eh the question posed by the senator was just clumsy: it was something like, "If your users don't pay you, how do actually you make money?"

Clearly the senator was trying to highlight the fact that Facebook can't have its users' best interests at heart, because its very existence depends on pillaging their data and whoring out their eyeballs to the highest bidder. But by playing the fool he made himself actually look like a fool, because he left himself wide open to Zuck's "Senator... we run ads" zinger.

The problem is there are a whole lot of completely clueless people in Congress who ask profoundly stupid questions demonstrating they know nothing, and we expect them to govern.

Or perhaps it doesn't matter whether a particular Member of Congress knows something, but the important part is to have the responsible person in the room and giving testimony, on the record, under oath.

What one considers a "profoundly stupid question" can be a question that shines a light to a heart of the problem or provides necessary context.

For one such example, the question "how Facebook makes money" provides context so that other people would better understand what follows.

"Will you ban Finsta?" was not an example of such a question. It was a profoundly stupid question from someone who had the resources to educate themselves before asking it.

The question asked not for me (although...) or you, but for wider audience.

For one immediate example, I do not know what or who Finsta is. The answer to that question, as well as preceding dialogue, would help me to navigate through Facebook's business, and my path would be skewed to favor viewpoint of the interrogator.

This is not discussion of peers, but discussion before a jury.

Past a certain point optimism simply becomes wilful naivety.

I’d rather people that ask questions and are not afraid to ask even if silly over people “who know everything” to govern.

I prefer people who know quite a bit and come prepared to hearings, as their official job title claims to be, over people just asking questions to fund their next campaign with sound bites or news articles about their impassioned speeches.

No one learns anything new at these hearings. And everyone is posturing.

I don't see how it was a stupid question, it was made to make zuckerberg admit that facebook is just an advertising company with a social media side project

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