Happy 20th birthday, Facebook… isn’t it now time you grew up?

They may be mighty, those new tech giants, the digital masters of the universe, their owners some of the richest people in the history of the world, and wielding vast power and influence over the lives of people who use their services – but they can still be forced to account for their actions and made to apologise for the harms they cause.

Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example, founder of Facebook and worth about $140bn – about 70 times more than King Charles, for example. This week, he ought to have been untroubled by pesky politicians while he celebrates the 20th birthday of his creation, now part of his even bigger group, Meta, which includes Instagram, Threads and the plotting politician’s favourite app, WhatsApp, each a substantial, global business in its own right.

Zuckerberg, nerdy as they come, would no doubt have been happiest back in the labs at Meta, inventing some new metaverse or just tucking into a slice of celebratory virtual cake.

Yet here he was, up before a Senate committee and being harangued by a bunch of populist politicians, barracked, unable to start a sentence let alone finish one, and confronted with the parents of child abuse victims – or, as the senators would have it, victims of Facebook.

It was Missouri senator Josh Hawley, ambitious even by the standards of the breed, who took it upon himself to demand that Zuckerberg prostrate himself before them – and take actual, personal responsibility for what had happened to people the billionaire boss doesn’t know and has never met: “Would you like to apologise for what you’ve done to these good people?”

As Hawley called on the families to hold up the pictures of the kids who were harmed and lost their lives via the misuse of Meta platforms by perverts and criminals, this was a rather rhetorical “request”. Zuckerberg’s famously blank expression doesn’t give much of anything away at the best of times, but he was visibly bewildered, if not humbled, as he rose uncertainly to his feet, turned to the assembled ordinary folk and offered his condolences.

He said: “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”

The Senate judiciary committee hearing was packed with families of children and advocates. Lindsey Graham was more measured than Hawley but he still accused the social media bosses arraigned before him, including representatives of X (better known as Twitter), TikTok, Snapchat and Discord of “destroying lives, and threatening democracy itself … I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.”

There comes a point in such emotional and frankly insoluble issues, such as the role, accountability and liability of social media companies, when the arguments have to stop and action has to start. The companies are right to say that they are not, in the classic sense, publishers, that they merely provide a platform, and there is hardly an innovation known to man that hasn’t been subverted by evil people doing appalling things. They surely have a point when they argue they cannot control or police the trillions of contributions that billions of people make online. If they tried, they argue, they’d go bust.

Yet the politicians and the victims’ families are surely also right to highlight what happens when social media becomes antisocial. They are right, though it’s a cheaper point, that these huge capitalist concerns do, putting it credibly, put money before people. They can also make a plausible argument that since the original laws were passed in America that effectively gave the platforms immunity – and thus promoted their phenomenal growth – they have evolved. Choices about moderation can be made.

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk makes that point graphically. As a “free-speech absolutist”, he has radically weakened the guidelines on abuse and run down the moderation function. So now, it’s a barely habitable cesspit of propaganda, misinformation, racism, antisemitism and hate, and the only reason it hasn’t collapsed is that a suitable new platform hasn’t yet emerged to replace it.

The point is that X, as must learn to call it, doesn’t have to be the way it is. When it was a more congenial, less hateful environment, it was probably, for that very reason, more commercially successful than where Musk is now taking it. But in any case, X doesn’t have to be the way it is.

We need to cut through the endless arguments about the rights of property and free speech and treat social media as the major digital utilities that they are, often near-monopolies and just as capable of creating social harm as a sewage pipe (an appropriate analogy) or a dangerous electricity cable. They have to be regulated to make them safer to use and to make them fit for a liberal democratic society, not a means to destroy it.

They do need to be tamed and civilised and rendered less harmful by laws because they have shown themselves incapable of self-regulation, because their owners don’t believe in it or it reduces earnings, or both.

We need to get the paedophiles out of Facebook and the like, and we need to make the companies do that. We have to give regulation a trial and see how it works, or not. It may be that the law of unintended consequences will swing into action, and we end up with new channels on the dark web, or more encrypted forms of social media, edging further away from the authorities and wreaking even more misery. We might also end up having to pay more for these platforms and channels because of the cost of making them safer environments.

Yet, like every other major commercial activity that has developed over the centuries, from factory conditions to clean water to banking to the safety of motor cars, private companies have had to be subjected to control and had safeguards imposed upon them. It will be a constantly evolving process of regulation, a game of cat and mouse, but there’s plainly no alternative and it’s long overdue.

Or, as Senator Graham put it: “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem, we’re going to die waiting.”