With the ever-splitting American psyche contorting the average U.S. consumer into a shell of themselves through the profound impact of divisive and exploitative social media content, a senate hearing was held on Wednesday pertaining to the overall culpability of the social media networks themselves.

It appears that platforms seem to be using section 230 of the FCC’s Communications Act as some kind of quasi-patriotic token of plausible deniability in the wake of a laundry list of allegations ranging from child pornography to grossly inappropriate and triggering content.

Parents, who held photos of their deceased or disturbed children, many of whom died by suicide, audibly hissed at Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, as he entered the Senate Chamber. According to NBC News, some of the family members who attended the hearing hold Meta’s subsidiary, Instagram, responsible for facilitating the abuse and suicide of their children.

This comes after Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by META Platforms, was found to help connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. META stock rose 20% since the hearing.

Then there is the case of misinformation and even disinformation. A lingering pestilence that slowly amasses lynch mobs and devolves them into congregations of devoutly malinformed simians. From foreign actors to the foreign bots programmed by them, the very revenue streams that prop up our economy are simultaneously destroying the values and ethics of our industries and the inhabitants of their environs.

In a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth. Ex Postdoc/PhD at MIT, and Ex fellow at Harvard, it was found that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

Witnesses at the Senate hearing included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron. This was Zuckerberg’s eighth time testifying before Congress. It was a first for Yaccarino, Spiegel and Citron, who were subpoenaed to appear. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, said Citron “only accepted services of this subpoena after U.S. Marshals were sent to Discord’s headquarters at taxpayer expense.”

Lawmakers used the hearing to push for a package of bills meant “to help stop the exploitation of kids online,” including the STOP CSAM Act, which would allow victims of child exploitation to sue tech platforms.