Congress wants to hold Zuckerberg accountable for sex trafficking, white supremacy and more.
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the source of society’s woes, though you’d never know that based on his appearance before the House Financial Services Committee last week. He was summoned to discuss Facebook’s digital currency project, but his inquisitors had no shortage of other topics in mind.
Congress has a long and inglorious history of dragging CEOs up to Capitol Hill for televised beat-downs, but even by those standards the hearing was remarkable. To hear these lawmakers, you’d think that there is no problem on the planet that isn’t somehow, some way the fault of a company founded 15 years ago.
Republican Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri expressed concern that Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t doing enough to fight sex trafficking. Rep. Bill Posey, a Florida Republican, asked why there aren’t more “fair and open discussions” on Facebook about the “risk associated with vaccinations.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, believes Facebook should be policing the political ads of her opponents. And Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, asked why Facebook isn’t doing more to silence the “white supremacist hate groups” that use its platform. “I know this is going to be really hard in this setting,” she said to Mr. Zuckerberg. “But try to see me beyond just a congresswoman, but also as a mother that is raising two Muslim boys in this pretty dark time in our world.”
Because Mr. Zuckerberg is a wealthy white man, and because liberals today obsess over social inequality, it was only a matter of time before the discussion turned to race and gender. New York Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks blamed Mr. Zuckerberg for both Brexit and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election—“Facebook has been systemically found at the scene of the crime. Do you think that’s just a coincidence?”—and then demanded to know how much of Facebook’s money is kept in black-owned banks.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, wanted to know how many of the law firms retained by Facebook are “diverse-owned or women-owned” and how many of the platform’s users are black. She seemed baffled when Mr. Zuckerberg replied that the company doesn’t collect data on race. Democrat Al Green of Texas asked how many of the companies working with Facebook on the currency project are headed by “members of the LGBTQ-plus community.” When Mr. Zuckerberg said he couldn’t say offhand, the congressman said to find out and get back to him. “I plan to share it with the public,” said Mr. Green. “The public needs to know whether this is an organization that is truly diverse or whether it is an organization that is owned and operated by a small group of persons, all of whom have similar characteristics, for want of better terminology.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has been the face of social media for a long time and no doubt is used to this treatment by now. But Washington isn’t the only place where politicians are trying to blame him for problems that predate Facebook, or even predate Mark Zuckerberg. The company recently agreed to spend $1 billion to address housing shortages in California’s Silicon Valley, where it’s based. This may buy the company a few favorable headlines and some temporary respite from state regulators, but it will do next to nothing to address Silicon Valley’s affordable-housing mess. On cue, California Gov. Gavin Newsom praised Mr. Zuckerberg and called for more “partnership with the private sector and philanthropy to change the status quo and address the cost crisis our state is facing.” Huh? A few more big checks from billionaires won’t make a dent in the state’s housing shortage. California needs fewer regulations, not more aid from tech entrepreneurs.
Fifty years ago, housing costs in the Bay Area were just as affordable as in many other parts of the country. By 2017 median house prices in places like San Francisco and San Jose had risen to nearly 250% above the national average, according to census data. Liberals blame the housing shortage on the growth of Silicon Valley, but the real culprit was government intervention in housing markets. Starting in the 1970s, California implemented all manner of “open space” laws and “smart growth” policies to restrict housing construction. It worked.
“In California, production has fallen so far that Houston—a single Texas metropolitan area—produced as many new homes in 2014 as the entire Golden State,” writes demographer Joel Kotkin. “Given the extraordinary costs of land in places like California, many developers only find it worthwhile to build homes largely for the affluent.”
Facebook isn’t responsible for California’s housing crisis any more than it’s to blame for sex trafficking, white nationalism, antivaccine quackery or the dearth of black partners at white-shoe law firms. But politicians need scapegoats and whipping boys to deflect attention away from bad policies. And it seems to be Mark Zuckerberg’s turn in the stocks.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal