Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate on Facebook’s handling of personal data. The marathon session hinged largely on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political data firm hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign harvested account information for targeted political ads. Zuckerberg’s testimony, which continued in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, was intended to help Congress determine what regulation, if any, might be needed to protect both the security of the American people’s personal information and the sanctity of future elections. But it quickly became clear that Congress members had little more working knowledge of the platform than my late grandmother, who refused to buy a computer, and stubbornly insisted that Zuckerberg’s social platform was called “Book of Faces.” That’s cute and funny, because my grandma was not responsible for authoring public policy.

Perhaps because of Facebook’s prominence in pop culture, and our collective awareness of Zuckerberg’s story as it was told in The Social Network, the testimony was evaluated as if it were entertainment. Coverage of the session so centered around Zuckerberg as a character that there were entire articles dedicated to his suit choice, and also multiple supercuts of him saying the word "senator" a lot. In other analyses, he was both criticized for being evasive and praised for being extensively prepared. Overall, the general takeaway seemed to be that the leader of the tech giant emerged “unscathed.” If only the same could be said for the 2016 election. One story published by CNN ahead of the Capitol Hill session went so far as to declare this Zuckerberg’s “growing up moment,” as if the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company ought to be held to the standards of a teen boy studying for his bar mitzvah. In this shameful, softball handling of Facebook's founder, there was another important performance sorely lacking in scrutiny: that of the senators asking the questions.

Throughout the session, the Senate collectively demonstrated a glaring inability to understand Facebook. Orrin Hatch literally furrowed his brow as he asked Zuckerberg how he sustains a business model with no paid subscriptions and Brian Schatz’s question about “emailing within WhatsApp” may have caused a few people to scratch their heads. (Members of the House of Representatives were perceived as having done a slightly better job.) Any effort that might have gone toward grilling the tech giant on his commitment to security was squandered by expressing cluelessness about how it all works in the first place. There was quite a bit of age-related commentary in this regard — and, truly, our need for more young people in office has rarely been more painfully obvious than while watching Zuckerberg explain the Internet to a group whose average age is 61. Except, outside of lazy jokes, age is not a legitimate barrier for understanding social media use, and even if it was, the reality is that understanding the prevailing method of American communication is their job.

It is hard to overstate the role of the internet in American life. Social media is now the core site of our national dialogue, and Facebook is our most prominent platform. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans use it. How, then, is it even remotely acceptable for our representatives to be so out of touch with how it works?