‘You’ve Got Blood on Your Hands!’ Lindsey Graham Assails Mark Zuckerberg at Senate Hearing

The CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X, formerly known as Twitter, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the ranking Republican on the committee, made clear in his opening statement why the tech leaders were there as he accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of having “blood on your hands.”

“The Republicans will answer the call. All of us. Every one of us is ready to work with you and our Democratic colleagues on this committee to prove to the American people that while Washington is certainly broken, there’s a ray of hope,” Graham said in his opening statement adding:

And it is here. It lies with your children. After years of working on this issue with you and others, I’ve come to conclude the following: social media companies, as they are currently designed and operate, are dangerous products.

Graham went on to tell the story of one of his teenage constituents who was extorted online and eventually killed himself.
“And as things go at that stage in life, he gave her some photos, compromising sexual photos. And it turned out that she was part of an extortion group in Nigeria. They threatened the young man that if you don’t give us money, we’re going to expose these photos. He gave them money, but it wasn’t enough. They kept threatening and he killed himself,” Graham explained, adding:

These are bastards by any known definition. Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us. I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands!

You have a product. You have a product that’s killing people. When we had cigarets killing people, we did some about it. Maybe, not enough, you’re going to talk about guns. We have the ATF. Nothing here. There’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it. You can’t be sued.

Now, Senator Blumenthal and Blackburn, who’ve been like the dynamic duo here, have found emails from your company where they warned you about this stuff and you decided not to hire 45 people that could do a better job of policing this. So the bottom line is you can’t be sued. You should be. And these emails would be great for punitive damages. But the courtroom is closed.

Every American abused by all the companies in front of me, of all the people in America we could give blanket liability protection to. This would be the last group I would pick. It is now time to repeal section 230. This committee is made up of the ideologically most different people you could find. We’ve come together through your leadership, Mr. Chairman, to pass five bills to deal with the problem of exploitation of children.

“What do you do with dangerous products? Either allow lawsuits. You have statutory protections to protect consumers, or you have a commission of sorts to regulate the industry in question, to take your license away – if you have a license or to fine you,” Graham continued, adding:

None of that exists here. We live in an American 2024 where there is no regulatory body dealing with the most profitable, biggest companies in the history of the world. They can’t be sued. And there’s not one law in the book that’s meaningful protecting the American consumer. Other than that, we’re in a good spot.

Graham concluded by joking about how this issue even managed to bring him together with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to cosponsor a bill. He vowed bipartisan action to get his legislation passed and ended with a few short remarks on the good social media has brought to society, while arguing that the government must finally deal with the bad it has wrought as well.

Watch the clip above.