Social media CEOs called to Senate Judiciary hearing

Allison Mollenkamp, CQ-Roll Call on May 15, 2026

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WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee has called on the executives of major social media companies to testify before the panel next month regarding child online safety.

Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, sent letters to the heads of Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok earlier this month seeking attendance at a hearing on June 23 titled “Examining Tech Industry Practices and the Implications for Users and Families: Is This Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment?”

The letters went to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram; Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, which owns Snapchat; TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew; and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The CEOs have not yet committed to testify. Committee spokesperson Hannah Akey said that staff are in “active conversations” and hope to be able to confirm “sooner rather than later.”

Akey previewed the hearing in a statement Friday.

“Chairman Grassley looks forward to shining additional light on his oversight of Big Tech and social media companies, including his investigations and legislation addressing child safety online.”

Akey said the hearing will include broad oversight of the companies and could touch on a variety of issues relevant to the committee’s work and the online space.

In February, the committee approved three bills Grassley sponsored as part of a manager’s amendment to a House-passed bill that would criminalize threats to distribute sexual depictions of a minor. The package carries the name of James T. Woods, a teenager who died by suicide in 2022 after being the victim of online sexual extortion.

Grassley’s bills included sections on sentencing guidelines for child sexual abuse material, threats to distribute such material and schemes to coerce children into violence.

The upcoming oversight hearing comes after the committee’s panel on Privacy, Technology and the Law held a hearing earlier this week in response to verdicts in New Mexico and California that found Meta and Google liable for harms to young people on their platforms.

That hearing centered in part on a bill sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., known as the Kids Online Safety Act, that would require platforms to be designed to prevent harms like anxiety, depression and compulsive use.

Blackburn argued that the verdicts show a path for regulating social media companies based on their design features, rather than third-party content.

Under Section 230 of the 1996 communications law, online platforms are not the publisher of third-party content hosted on their sites and cannot be held liable for their content management policies.

The law has long stood as a barrier to suits against social media companies. The cases in New Mexico and California relied instead on state consumer protection and personal injury law and focused on design features of platforms.

The full committee’s ranking member, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., has used the comparison between social media and tobacco companies in the past. After the verdicts against Meta and Google, he used it in a statement.

“These back-to-back decisions in New Mexico and California show that Big Tech has become Big Tobacco. Now, it’s time for Congress to sunset Section 230 once and for all,” he said.

Durbin is a co-sponsor of bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that would repeal Section 230 after two years.

The committee also recently forwarded a bill, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., that would require providers of artificial intelligence companion chatbots to verify users’ ages and ban minors from the companions.

Ackey said that topics for questioning, while not yet set, could also include whistleblower retaliation at social media companies, ties with China, targeted advertising for children and teens and data privacy.

Earlier this year, the Senate passed a bill, known as COPPA 2.0 for its updates to a 1998 law of the same name, that would boost protections for children regarding the collection and use of their data by online platforms and extend such protections to teens under the age of 17.