By Courtney Rozen
May 15 (Reuters) – The CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, TikTok and Snap have been invited back to Capitol Hill to answer questions from U.S. lawmakers about children’s online safety, according to a Senate aide.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican, invited Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew and Snap’s Evan Spiegel, said Hannah Akey, a spokeswoman for Grassley.
The companies are facing mounting criticism in the U.S. over child and teen safety.
If the CEOs accept the invitation for a hearing, which was first reported by Axios, it would allow members of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee to press the executives on the topics in a public setting.
Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn and Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, two committee members, are working to persuade their colleagues to back legislation requiring the companies to take more responsibility for how their apps affect children and teens.
The U.S. Congress has so far declined to pass comprehensive legislation regulating social media, prompting states to pass their own laws.
At least 20 states enacted laws last year on social media use and children, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization that tracks state bills.
Snap, Meta, Alphabet’s Google and TikTok are separately facing thousands of lawsuits in federal and state court in California accusing them of designing addictive platforms that undermine children’s mental health.
Meta and Alphabet’s Google, owner of YouTube, lost the first case to go before a jury in March, resulting in a $6 million verdict. TikTok and Snap settled with the plaintiff ahead of the trial. More trials are planned for the summer.
A New Mexico jury ordered Meta in March to pay $375 million in civil penalties in a trial over child exploitation and user safety claims.
Spokespeople for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters about the invitations from Congress.
Spiegel, Zuckerberg and Chew last testified before Congress in 2024, when the same Senate committee questioned them about escalating threats of sexual predation on their platforms.
Pichai has participated in a few congressional hearings, including one in 2021 about misinformation.
For TikTok’s Chew, this would be his first time testifying on Capitol Hill since the company’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, finalized a deal to split the U.S. app from its global business.
ByteDance has disclosed few details about the deal, and a hearing would allow lawmakers to ask questions about President Donald Trump’s role in brokering the split and Chinese involvement in the U.S. app.
The American-owned joint venture was established to avoid a U.S. ban on the social media app.
The U.S. enacted a law in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell the app or see it shut in the country.
Concerns about whether the Chinese government could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app prompted Congress to pass the law. TikTok at the time said it had not shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen in Washington and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)
Comments