United States Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri deserves credit for badgering Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, last week into offering an apology to the families of children victimized by sexual predation on social media.
At the same time, it was not as if Zuckerberg's expression of remorse at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on big tech and the online child sexual exploitation crisis, held in Washington on Wednesday, was unprecedented: he has a lot of experience saying he’s sorry in public, going back to when he was a teenager.
The hard part, after someone apologizes, is making amends. And here is where Hawley and his fellow Republicans should enlist the help of their Democratic colleagues. When it comes to the relationship between business and government, Democrats know that you cannot just ask executives to be more mindful. You need to make actual rules and regulations that force the pursuit of profit to advance the public interest.