Mark Zuckerberg

• Title: CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram
• Congressional appearances: This will be Zuckerberg’s eighth time testifying. His first was in 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Zuckerberg’s Meta announced in November it was joining the Lantern program, a coalition of tech companies formed to share information about accounts that violate child safety policies. Meta regularly finds and reports a large number of CSAM files on its platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

In previous appearances before Congress, the Facebook founder has faced questions over his platforms’ approach to policing content online. These appearances often feature politically motivated questioning from lawmakers — in particular Republicans, who have probed whether Facebook censors conservative posts, an allegation Zuckerberg and other tech executives have repeatedly denied.

The last time he testified, in April 2021, Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs were asked about their platforms’ roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol and election misinformation.

As a leader of one of the most prominent and often controversial tech companies, Zuckerberg has become skilled at such appearances, repeatedly defending his company’s model of attempting to balance free speech with online safety.

Child sex images are booming online. Congress wants to know why.

Linda Yaccarino

• Title: CEO of X since June 2023
• Congressional appearances: This will be Yaccarino’s first time testifying.

The company is “determined to make X inhospitable for actors who seek to exploit minors,” X wrote in a blog published last Friday. The platform suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating child sexual exploitation policies in 2023, a massive increase from the 2.3 million accounts it suspended for that purpose in 2022 — a move it attributed to better detection tools.

Yaccarino took over from Elon Musk as CEO of X last year after the billionaire bought Twitter and laid off the majority of its staff. She was previously an advertising executive at NBC.

Yaccarino has been working to gain back the trust of advertisers after a shaky year when many prominent advertisers pulled spending from the site amid pushback over Musk’s controversial comments online and his gutting of the company’s trust and safety team.

Axios reported that Yaccarino has met with several bipartisan members of the Senate in the run-up to the hearing.

Shou Zi Chew

• Title: CEO of TikTok since 2021
• Congressional appearances: This will be Chew’s second time testifying before Congress. He first appeared last March.

TikTok says it uses its own detection systems for CSAM as well as partnering with other organizations to detect and remove violative content. TikTok, which is popular with younger users, also has controls to protect kids’ accounts and to detect when users might be underage.

Chew launched an aggressive push last year to meet with lawmakers before his first congressional appearance, seeking to assure them that the short-form video app did not pose a national security threat. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has faced allegations for years that it could be a threat to national security, resulting in some attempted bans of the app in the United States.

In an interview with The Post last year, Chew said many of the suspicions against TikTok were “misinformed.”

“We understand we start from a place of trust deficit,” Chew said last year, “and that trust is not won by one move, one silver bullet, one meeting.”

Evan Spiegel

• Title: CEO of Snap
• Congressional appearances: This will be Spiegel’s first time testifying before Congress.

Spiegel, one of the co-founders of Snapchat’s parent company Snap, has been the company’s chief executive for over a decade. Snapchat uses technology including PhotoDNA and Google’s Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Match to detect and combat CSAM, and endorsed the Kids Online Safety Act last week, according to The Hill.

Once one of the world’s youngest billionaires, Spiegel has steered Snap through increased competition and the closure of its division creating augmented reality for business last year.

The company, which operates a camera app used for sharing photos which is popular with younger users, announced new protections for teens in September.

Jason Citron

• Title: CEO of Discord
• Congressional appearances: This will be Citron’s first time testifying before Congress.

Citron, the co-founder of chat forum Discord, created the popular site to help video gamers communicate with each other while playing.Discord lets users form servers to chat by text, audio or video. The platform is still popular with gamers, but has become more mainstream in the past several years, especially as people looked for ways to connect online during the pandemic.

In December, the company published a blog post about a new model it developed to detect CSAM. It’s working with other tech companies to identify and combat the material, it said.

The company was forced into an unwelcome spotlight last year when a Post investigation revealed that a Massachusetts Air National Guard member allegedly shared hundreds of classified documents that he obtained at work on Discord. That raised concerns about Discord’s moderation policies, which The Post found rely partly on users themselves to report others’ bad behavior.

Cristiano Lima-Strong and Will Oremus contributed to this report.

Photos by Josh Edelson, Jerod Harris, Frederic J. Brown, Kimberly White via Getty Images; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.