I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, October 6th.

As Facebook is bad for democracy, as bad for children, as bad for racial and gender equality, as it was portrayed

to be in congressional testimony yesterday by whistleblower Francis Hoggin. Should the government

take action to reduce Facebook's potential for personal and social destruction? And if so,

what would that government action be? If the right and left are both so angry at Facebook, but for politically opposite reasons,

you know, censorship of the right versus enabling of right-wing disinformation,

how do we get to the truth about its real impact?

Listen to this from yesterday's hearing, the very conservative Republican Senator Roger

Wicker of Mississippi. I talked to an opinion maker just down the hall a few moments before this

hearing. This person said the tech gods have been demystified now.

And I think this hearing today, Mr. Chair,

is a part of the process of demystifying big tech.

The children of America are hooked on their product. It is often destructive and harmful, and there is a cynical knowledge on behalf of the leadership of these big tech companies, that that is true.

Roger Wicker from Mississippi, and here's the very liberal Democratic senator, Edward Markey, of Massachusetts.

Here's my message for Mark Zuckerberg. Your time of invading our privacy, promoting toxic content,

and praying on children and teens is over. So can they both be right? Is this the only thing they agree on? And if so, why? Here's the

whistleblower herself, armed with documents she took from the company, as well as her own,

Francis Hogan's own opinions, like this one. The algorithms are very smart in the sense that they latch on to things that people want

to continue to engage with.

And unfortunately, in the case of teen girls and things like self-harm, they develop these

feedback cycles where children are using Instagram as to self-soothe, but then are exposed

to more and more content that makes them hate themselves.

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