Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has a serious quarantine beard going.
When he showed up (virtually) for the Senate hearing on Section 230 on Wednesday, folks were quick to meme his decidedly unkempt facial hair. You can hardly blame them. Dorsey’s beard is both a Choice and a Look.
The Senate hearing was dubbed “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” In short: Section 230 makes it so that online platforms, for the most part, are not responsible for the things its users posts.
In theory, that’s what was under discussion, but Dorsey’s wizard-y vibe got more attention than much of the conversation between the tech CEOs and senators. Here’s just a small collection of the many jokes made about @jack’s facial hair.
“world’s longest fingernails” record holder
no I’m not sure how one makes a living at that
— Russ Bengtson (@russbengtson) October 28, 2020
Not to distract from the US hearing into big tech today — it’s important — but Jack Dorsey’s lockdown beard is a real 2020 mood. pic.twitter.com/T6j1PxcfSx
— Jen Dudley-Nicholson (@jendudley) October 28, 2020
The idea behind the hearing — does Section 230 allow for bad behavior — seems straightforward enough. Seems is the key word. Mashable’s Jack Morse wrote a good primer how that relies on the idea that people can agree on what constitutes bad behavior.
Republicans, generally speaking, have long claimed some sort of anti-conservative bias among tech platforms — this despite rightwing content utterly dominating Facebook, for instance, week after week. Early in Thursday’s hearing, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tried to attack Dorsey over the platform’s decision to, for a time, block a New York Post article with unsubstantiated claims about Hunter Biden.