YouTube, wildly popular with teens, gets a pass for kids safety hearing

Publish date: 2024-07-30

Correction: An earlier version of this story and a photo caption misstated Susan Wojcicki’s title. She is the former CEO of YouTube; the company’s current CEO is Neal Mohan.

Happy Tuesday! Send news tips and hot takes on the Wizards and Capitals potentially moving to northern Virginia to: cristiano.lima@washpost.com. (Mine is: that's far from me.)

Below: Epic Games wins its antitrust lawsuit against Google, and a first U.S. chips production grant goes to a British company. First:

YouTube, wildly popular with teens, gets a pass for kids safety hearing

The Senate Judiciary Committee last month announced that it will hear testimony from the chief executives of five major tech companies about their “failures to protect children online.” It’s the latest such session as lawmakers increasingly scrutinize how social media platforms may be exposing children to harmful content and contributing to youth mental health problems.

The hearing, set for Jan. 31, will be one of the biggest of its kind in years, with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew set to testify alongside the CEOs of Snap, Discord and X, who all will be appearing for the first time for their companies.

But the lineup for the session featured a notable omission: Google-owned YouTube.

The video-sharing platform is one of the most popular digital services among kids and teens, outpacing rivals in key usage metrics according to numerous studies, but the panel has not yet publicly called on its executives to testify or indicated any plans to do so this session.

Stanford Law School assistant professor Evelyn Doeuk, who has previously criticized lawmakers for not paying enough attention to YouTube, called the tech giant’s absence “baffling.”

“You'd think that if Congress was concerned with protecting kids online, they should hear from one of the platforms where kids spend most of their time online,” Douek said.

Its popularity among youth was further underscored Monday when the Pew Research Center released a survey finding that YouTube is by far the most widely used digital platform among teens ages 13 to 17, with 93 percent saying they have used the app.

Sixteen percent said they use it “almost constantly.”

By contrast, TikTok, Snapchat and Meta-owned Instagram — whose executives will all be testifying in January — trailed YouTube significantly in overall usage, with 63, 60 and 59 percent of teens, respectively, saying they have used those platforms. TikTok was the only site that topped YouTube in the share of teens who said they used it “almost constantly,” at 17 percent.

Fewer teens use Discord and X — the two other platforms represented at the hearing — according to the survey: 28 and 20 percent, respectively. (Pew did not ask respondents about the frequency of their usage of those sites, a spokesperson said.)

Although the survey was new, the findings should come as no surprise to lawmakers: Pew wrote that the “share of teens using these platforms has remained relatively stable since spring 2022.”

While it was “great to see Congress broadening the scope to include platforms like Discord and TikTok … the fact that YouTube remains a consistent blind spot is perplexing,” Douek said.

Judiciary spokeswoman Emily Hampsten said in a statement that the “five companies invited to testify have unique perspectives — and problems — when it comes to addressing online child sexual exploitation.”

She added, “While the slate the Committee has lined up for January is not exhaustive, the fact that we have so many options to consider for which Big Tech companies to haul in front of our committee is exactly why we need to legislate in this space.”

Some committee members suggested that YouTube could still appear before the panel.

“We want to get them all. We’ll see how it all develops. We’ve got a while,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said when asked about YouTube after the hearing was announced. “Hopefully we can get more of them here.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said “there have been discussions” about Google or YouTube testifying, but he declined to comment further.

Spokespeople for Google and YouTube did not return requests for comment.

While Google CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill and at times been pressed about children’s safety on YouTube, its longtime former chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, never appeared before Congress.

YouTube’s current CEO Neal Mohan has previously testified before Congress but not since taking over for Wojcicki earlier this year.

By contrast, both Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri have testified in recent years for Meta, with Mosseri testifying his first and only time at a solo session on children's safety in 2021 and Zuckerberg set to appear for the eighth time in January. (Google's Pichai, meanwhile, has appeared four times.)

Executives for TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube testified alongside one another at a separate 2021 hearing on kids safety, but none of their CEOs had appeared at the time. TikTok’s Chew testified for the first time earlier this year.

Our top tabs

Epic Games wins antitrust lawsuit against Google

Epic Games won an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Monday, in a landmark decision where a jury found that Google broke competition laws in how it ran its app store, our colleagues Gerrit De Vynck and Eva Dou report.

“The decision is a major blow to the tech giant” and the concept that Big Tech companies should have complete control over how pricing and payments are done “on their massive internet platforms,” Gerrit and Eva write, adding, “The jury’s decision could open up other Big Tech companies to challenges.”

A San Francisco jury last month began hearing testimony from Epic, which earlier this year was unsuccessful in getting a court to agree with a similar argument that Apple held an illegal monopoly in its App Store. The initial court deliberations began in 2020 when Epic marketed its popular Fortnite game on Android but sidestepped the Google Play billing system, which takes 30 percent of developers’ earnings if they make more than $1 million a year.

Google has contested Epic’s accusations on grounds that it competes with Apple in the app space and that it views taking revenue cuts from app purchases transacted through Google Play as a legitimate business practice.

First U.S. chips production grant goes to a British company

The Commerce Department on Monday passed over Silicon Valley firms and picked British defense contractor BAE Systems to receive the first grant from the Biden administration’s $52 billion mega pot of funds aimed at spurring domestic semiconductor manufacturing, our colleague Eva Dou reports.

The decision appears to be a sign that the Commerce Department is seeking to squelch criticism that the program, dubbed CHIPS for America, is protectionist, while simultaneously highlighting its role in enhancing U.S. national security, Eva writes.

“The U.S. division of BAE, Europe’s largest defense contractor, will receive $35 million in U.S. grants to help upgrade the company’s factory in Nashua, N.H., which produces chips for U.S. military equipment including for the F-35 stealth fighter jet,” the report says, adding that the Commerce Department says the grant would help BAE quadruple its chip production in New Hampshire.

“Semiconductor manufacturing is an expensive thing,” Tom Arseneault, CEO of BAE’s U.S. unit, BAE Systems, told Eva. “This will be a meaningful supplement to the path of investment that we’ve been on.”

Discord rules and culture allowed racist, antisemitic community to flourish, enabling document leaks

Discord’s rules and culture allowed a racist and antisemitic community to flourish, enabling young Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira to allegedly exploit Discord’s lack of oversight and content moderation to share top-secret intelligence documents for more than a year, our colleagues Samuel Oakford, Chris Dehghanpoor, Shane Harris and Frontline’s James O’Donnell report.

They write: “As the covid pandemic locked them down at home, Teixeira and a group of followers spent their days in a tightknit chat server that he eventually controlled. What began as a place to hang out while playing first-person-shooter games, laugh at gory videos and trade vile memes became something else entirely — the scene of one of the most damaging leaks of classified national security secrets in years.”

The report, which cites interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, moderators and researchers, later continues: “Discord allows anonymous users to control large swaths of its online meeting rooms with little oversight. To detect bad behavior, the company relies on largely unpaid volunteer moderators and server administrators like Teixeira to police activity, and on users themselves to report behavior that violates community guidelines.”

Daybook

The Heritage Foundation holds a discussion on AI risks and benefits at 10:30 a.m.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and other guests discuss U.S. tech and science innovation at a Washington Post Live event at 2 p.m.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee holds a hearing on strategic competition and export controls at 2 p.m.
The FCC convenes its December open meeting tomorrow at 10:30 a.m.
Former FCC commissioner Mike O’Rielly speaks with Georgetown University on 2023 telecom policy highlights tomorrow at noon.
NTIA leader Alan Davidson speaks with the Center for Democracy and Technology on the agency’s inquiry into open-source AI models tomorrow at 2 p.m.

Before you log off

That’s all for today — thank you so much for joining us! Make sure to tell others to subscribe to The Technology202 here. Get in touch with tips, feedback or greetings on Twitter or email.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZL2wuMitoJyrX2d9c3%2BOamloaWJkxrDB066ZnmWnnrmluNhmp6iopaGus3nWoquhZaSasq%2B%2FjKCcratdpa60v4ykoJ2rXaiup7HTsmShnZGntq%2Bzjg%3D%3D

ZingB

YouTube, wildly popular with teens, gets a pass for kids safety hearing

YouTube, wildly popular with teens, gets a pass for kids safety hearing

Our top tabs

Epic Games wins antitrust lawsuit against Google

First U.S. chips production grant goes to a British company

Discord rules and culture allowed racist, antisemitic community to flourish, enabling document leaks

Agency scanner

Inside the industry

Privacy monitor

Workforce report

Trending

Daybook

Before you log off