Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced Congress on Tuesday for the first time. Through hours of testimony though, nothing much of substance seemed to be learned about Facebook or the more specific reason Zuckerberg was testifying, the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. To be fair to the Senate, there were a few members, like Kamala Harris, who really demanded answers for Facebook not notifying it's users during certain data breaches. However, most of what happened on Tuesday seemed to be a general rundown of what Facebook is, how it works, and some of the most basic knowledge of the platform. Very little of it seemed to deal with any of what the American people are actually concerned about. The cause of this? Old senators who don't seem to really grasp the situation.

Eighty-four-year-old Senator Orrin Hatch didn't understand that Facebook generated revenue from ads. Sixty-seven-year-old Deb Fischer asked a question about "data categories" on Facebook that no one really understood. Sixty-six-year-old John Kennedy told Zuckerberg that Facebook's user agreement "sucks," and then went on to list every single problem with the user agreement. Of course, this was only to be told by Zuckerberg at the end that all of the things he thought were missing from the user agreement were already under the current user agreement.

And many of these meandering questions continued. But I feel that those examples communicate the point well enough. Tuesday's testimony didn't really serve to answer the questions the public needs answers to. It served as a Facebook FAQ session. You effectively had people that lived their entire youths and most of their adult lives in a pre-internet era asking one of the creators of the modern day internet how exactly the internet works.

I don't mean for this article or some of the things I'm saying here to be ageist against old people. There are some old people who have a great understanding of the internet, and there are some young people who don't know much more about Facebook than it's the app they have on their phone. However, it is clear that the age, technological inexperience, as well as internet illiteracy of the Senate, has created a problem where the government doesn't understand the internet well enough to confront the issues that Facebook and other platforms present in the modern world.

And that seems to be part of the problem in a larger scope. Facebook is not the first and certainly will not be the last issue we have with data or the internet in general. Before we decide on any regulation or any policy in regards to the internet or how social media works, the people that create that regulation and policy have to have a better than average understanding of the intricacies of the internet and social media. And it's clear with the Senate getting older and less in tune with technology and internet, that that will only become harder and harder to achieve.

Now, we'll have to see what happens today. As I'm writing this, Mark Zuckerberg has just begun his second day of testimony, this time in front of the committee of energy and commerce. But if our government's lack of awareness on hot-button issues like the internet and data collection continues, then Facebook will remain unchallenged, for years to come. We need people with the right amount of tact and insight on the internet to really challenge Zuckerberg and future issues past this one in general.

Otherwise, our data and our security will most certainly remain at risk. Unfortunately, members of our very own government do not have the tact and insight we so desperately need to be able to face these issues, as shown on Tuesday.