In a congressional hearing with the senate commerce committee, tech company representatives were held accountable for the content published in their platform in regard to it interfering with online privacy policies. The only company that was not present in the hearing was Facebook, as a warning had already been released for the social media giant about the harmful impact that Instagram’s algorithm has on children and teens. The representatives of respective social media platforms like Snapchat and YouTube firmly distinguished themselves from Facebook arguing that their approaches of respecting privacy policies and protecting underaged children utilized a different strategy. Particularly, this argument was set forth by Snapchat on the grounds of their chats deleting automatically by default to increase safety among users. Likewise, representatives of Youtube defended their strategies with recent implementations of age group categories, filters and ongoing human review. Despite their efforts, the chair if the sub-committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security emphasized that while these companies have separated themselves from Facebook and Instagram, that is not adequate reasoning to glorify inappropriate content in a different way. He continued is argument by adding that this might be a good time to do additional research and get better consensus about how to move forward.

I believe this article is pertinent to media news because of the ongoing privacy issues we have encountered as consumers have lead to nation-wide debates about reform. Regulation is necessary and major social media companies being held accountable for inappropriate content has had a long time coming. With the media landscape rising by the minute, it is imperative to take preventative measures and avoid negative exposure of underaged individuals. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media-giants-try-distance-facebook-rcna3831