The Era Of Declining Parental Accountability

Why do U.S. parents offshore the responsibility for their kids to tech oligarchs and then think the U.S. Senate will somehow save it all?

I guess the first word you come back to always with these things is grandstanding. Nothing ever gets accomplished at Congressional hearings. What happens is that guys like Ted Cruz get their staff to print out comically-large tweets, or bring along books where gay dogs get married, and then the people on the Congressional dais chastise Big Tech leaders, and there’s some nice sound bites and moments, but ultimately the Big Tech leader flies back private to the Bay Area and we mostly forget about all of it for another 1.5 years, or another until grandstanding hearing.

The last little cycle we had, last week, was about “child online safety,” and basically you saw some of the clips Josh Hawley will use in his 2032 Presidential run on display, including forcing Zuck to stand up and apologize to parents who had lost children to online bullying, tainted drug purchases, etc:

Again, mostly grandstanding. Josh Hawley is huge on “modern masculinity” and “ways to improve men,” and while his performance here has some of the rage and need for authority common in lots of men, I’m not sure boxing some autistic CEO into a corner and forcing a fake apology is per SE “masculine.” It does land you some applause and points from the assembled hoi polloi, though.

The biggest question here is twofold: