Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Mid-Stream Impressions of Zuckerberg's Senate Testimony

Virtually every Senator questioning Mark Zuckerberg so far is going through a sort of smirky "we'd hate to have to order you to suppress content we don't like, so you probably ought to voluntarily suppress content we don't like (wink, wink)."

The ones who aren't taking that tack are just coming right out and saying "we're going to regulate you, how about you tell us what kind of regulation you'd like" (Lindsey Graham appears to like the EU model of time-sensitive censorship and got Zuck to admit to kind of liking it too).

One of "my" Senators, Bill Nelson, seemed gobsmacked by the bizarre idea that if Facebook couldn't sell advertising it would have to find another way to make money, like charging users. Of course, Nelson usually does sound like a senile idiot, so that's not especially surprising.

And of course the Democrats are all pretending that Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and !Them Russians! are to blame for Hillary Clinton's disaster of a losing presidential campaign.

Nothing good is going to come of this. But you didn't need me to tell you that.

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