The Excerpt podcast: Tech CEOs grilled at tense Senate hearing over online child safety

On today's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Tech CEOs were grilled at a Senate hearing over online child safety. USA TODAY Money Reporter Bailey Schulz has a recap. The House has passed a bipartisan bill to expand the child tax credit and bring business tax breaks. The Fed holds interest rates steady, while Wall Street takes a tumble. USA TODAY Health Reporter Karen Weintraub talks about obesity rights. It's the start of Black History Month.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, February 1st, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today how tech leaders were pressed on child safety during a Senate hearing. Plus the house passes a bill that would expand the child tax credit, and we discuss obesity rights.

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Tech CEOs were grilled yesterday during a 10th Senate hearing over online child safety. I spoke with USA Today money reporter, Bailey Schulz to put the hearing in context. Bailey, thanks for hopping on.

Bailey Schulz:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

What exactly was this hearing focused on and who was asked to testify?

Bailey Schulz:

Yeah, so lawmakers were noting their growing concerns around the risks associated with social media and what that might mean for kids and teens. So some of those concerns include things around mental health pathways to drug dealing, sexual exploitation, and a host of other concerns. So we saw responses from the CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Discord, and Snap at this hearing.

Taylor Wilson:

And Bailey, there were some really moving moments from the family's testimony. Let's play a clip from the compiled video aired by the Senate Committee. Just before the hearing.

Speaker in video:

We got a phone call to find out that my son was in his room and was suicidal. He was only 13 years old at the time. Him and a friend had been exploited online and trafficked, and my son reached out to Twitter. Twitter, or now X's response was, "Thank you for reaching out. We reviewed the content and we did not find a violation of our policies. So no action will be taken at this time."

Taylor Wilson:

So Bailey, powerful moments there from the parents. How did the tech CEOs react hearing this?

Bailey Schulz:

Yeah, so we actually saw rare apologies come out during this hearing where Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which is the parent company to Instagram and Facebook. He at one point actually stood up, turned around and faced a lot of these families of victims and apologized and kind of talked about how the company's working towards solutions. And then we also saw the Snap CEO, apologize didn't do the whole standing and turning around, but he said that he was sorry that the company has not been able to prevent these sort of tragedies.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, so they apologized, but how did tech leaders say they plan to respond going forward? Did they promise changes here, Bailey?

Bailey Schulz:

So the interesting thing from the hearing was that these tech leaders mentioned that they don't agree with a lot of these bills that these lawmakers are proposing as written. So there's kind of a lot of hedging around answers. When lawmakers were asking, yes or no, do you agree with this bill? But we did see a lot of these tech heads talking about the different tools and settings and whatnot that they have already implemented to help make their platforms more safe for young users. And we did see a couple X and Snaps that say that they were in support of maybe a bill or two.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. And from the side and the perspective of lawmakers, I'm curious what's next on the legislative front to help keep kids safe and what did we hear from lawmakers in this hearing as well?

Bailey Schulz:

Yeah, so we do know that lawmakers are pushing to move forward with a package of bills that they say is meant to help stop the exploitation of kids online. But the thing is, we've had hearings like this before and we've seen these sort of testimonies before, and at least based on what we've seen so far in the past, a lot of times these bills don't go anywhere. The main takeaway from lawmakers is that there needs to be more laws on the books to sort of reign in on social media in these tech giants where we heard Senator Lindsey Graham mention that yes, there is an upside to social media, but he also know that the dark side has not been dealt with yet and was saying that this is now the time to deal with the dark side.

Taylor Wilson:

Bailey Schulz covers money for USA Today. Thank you so much, Bailey.

Bailey Schulz:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

The house yesterday passed a bipartisan bill that would expand the child tax credit for American families and reinstate some tax cuts for businesses. The bill cleared the chamber by an overwhelming vote of 357 to 70. Republicans in the House fast-tracked the legislation under a tactic known as suspension, which requires two third support. Still, the roughly $79 billion package faces a steep climb in the Senate where Republicans are demanding it clear additional hurdles. The bill would raise the tax credit to $1,800 per child in 2023 and up to $2,000 per child by 2025, and the legislation extends beyond parents. It would also create tax benefits for people impacted by natural disasters, and it would strengthen the low income housing credit. The bill is also set up to extend tax breaks for businesses through 2025 and to implement benefits to support trade with Taiwan. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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The Federal Reserve kept its short-term benchmark interest rates steady yesterday. It remained at a 23-year high of five and a quarter to five and a half percent for a fourth straight meeting. The Fed indicated rate cuts are possible down the road, but maybe not as soon as some economists had predicted. That would be a reversal of aggressive rate hikes of the past couple years to cool 40 year high inflation and the first-rate cut since March of 2020. Meanwhile, big tech stocks triggered a major slide for Wall Street yesterday. The Nasdaq composite fell 2.2% while the S&P 500 dropped 1.6% for its worst day since September.

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People with obesity are often disrespected within the healthcare system. Could an obesity bill of rights help remedy things? I spoke with USA Today health reporter Karen Weintraub to learn more. Hello, Karen.

Karen Weintraub:

Hello.

Taylor Wilson:

So Karen, can you start by telling us a bit about Patty Nece and her experience with obesity?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, so her experience is actually unfortunately pretty typical, where starting in third grade, she remembers the nurse wheeling a scale into the classroom, weighing all the kids, lining them up and telling her that she was fat in front of everybody and she was a very active kid. She loved to ski, to swim. She had a mint colored bicycle that was the envy of her classmates. She only got fatter as she remembered from there, her whole adolescence and adulthood, she was gaining weight no matter what she did. Again, she was active. It's probably in her genes. Every family photo going back in time that she could find, her ancestors were large. And so she struggled with her weight for years, for decades.

Finally, nearing retirement, she found a doctor who was supportive. She has managed to lose a lot of weight, 70 plus pounds. And then she went to an orthopedic doctor for some hip pain and he treated her just incredibly rudely, dismissive of her hip pain, barely spoke to her and was just like, "You have to lose weight. That's the only answer." And she said she teared up at a certain point and he said, "See, you're in so much pain, you're crying." And she thought to herself, no, I'm crying because you're being such a jerk. So later she found out that it was a congenital problem, something she'd been born with, that it had nothing to do with her obesity. But this is, again, a problem that many people with obesity face when they encounter the medical system, they're just not treated with respect.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, Karen, a lot of folks have similar stories to Patty's and a group of organizations has gathered together to create the Obesity Bill of Rights. What exactly are the rights they're focused on, Karen, and who's behind this effort?

Karen Weintraub:

So many of the rights are things like having the right equipment and being treated with respect. A lot of patients, large patients talk about going into doctor's waiting rooms and finding chairs with armrests that are so narrow they can't fit in the chairs. So we all have the experience of sitting on airplane seats, squeezing ourselves into airplane seats. Well, that's how they feel in the doctor's offices, just really physically uncomfortable. Or they try to step up on the tables and they don't feel safe in a doctor's office. So things like that, having the right equipment where they can feel safe.

The one criticism that I've heard about this Bill of Rights is that it is focused on medication and treatment rather than on the whole person, the people with obesity. So the So-called fat advocates, the people who say, "Look, I'm fine at any size that you shouldn't focus on me losing weight. You should just focus on me as a person." Again, to say that the emphasis is too much on weight loss, on medicalizing obesity, when really the problem is just that our society treats large people with disrespect, and that should be the focus not on weight loss.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. I mean, Karen, it is an interesting time for medicine around obesity and this conversation about weight loss. There's now a host of pretty effective weight loss treatments out there. What will this conversation around obesity rights look like going forward with all these new medications on the market?

Karen Weintraub:

So this is really the first time in history that we've had medications that are effective at treating obesity. There's been surgery for a long time, but there have been risks, and only about 2% of people who are eligible for bariatric surgery have opted for it. So these medications really do open the door for many more people to get effective treatment, except that they're very expensive and most people don't have insurance right now that covers it. And that's what a lot of this Bill of Rights and a lot of the emphasis is on right now for that. And again, the fat advocates say that this is really just a lobbying effort to get insurance coverage for these medications. They are useful, and for many people who've struggled for a long time, they are desperate, really for help in losing weight.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Karen Weintraub covers health for USA Today. Karen, interesting story. Thanks for hopping on.

Karen Weintraub:

Thanks so much.

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Taylor Wilson:

Today marks the Start to Black History Month. The commemoration was created to reflect on the past, acknowledge the continued struggle for racial justice, and draw inspiration from the achievements of African-Americans. Carter G. Woodson, known to many as the father of black History, came up with the concept of Negro History Week in 1926, intended to both create and popularize the knowledge about the black past. Woodson whose parents were enslaved, went on to be an author, a historian, and the second African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard. He formed an organization now known as the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. The group helped shift the celebration from a week to a month in 1976.

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Be sure to stay tuned to The Excerpt this afternoon when my colleague Dana Taylor sits down with Karen Weintraub, who you just heard. They'll discuss cognitive decline. You can find the episode on your favorite podcast app or YouTube at 4:00 PM Eastern Time. Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. Back tomorrow with more of the excerpt from USA Today.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Excerpt podcast: Tech CEOs grilled at tense Senate hearing