Senator Booker: Social media sites aren’t bad or good—ceding them to hate is the problem.

Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) may not generate the same attention as our current tweeter-in-chief, but he embraces social media just as much. When serving as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Sen Booker gained a reputation for regularly interacting with constituents on Twitter. And today, as a US senator, he continues to post across a variety of media. Booker's been doing Facebook videos from his office at nearly a weekly clip since early December, and so far the senator finds the platform unparalleled when it comes to generating a response.

"At times, I see [Facebook videos] as more valuable than a speech on the senate floor," Sen Booker told a capacity crowd during his keynote at the 2017 South By Southwest conference. "These are videos I put up for an audience to explain policy. In the senate, there are maybe 14 people watching me on C-SPAN, plus my mom makes 15. But my last Facebook video got something like one million views."

Ostensibly, Booker's speech served as the kick-off for the interactive portion of SXSW. But he often took the opportunity to touch on what he viewed as pressing political issues of the day: everything from the dangers of Attorney General Jeff Sessions for a criminal justice system that's overly reliant on incarceration to the broken US food system (where tax dollars fund ads for food, fund campaigns telling you not to eat those foods, and then fund health resources to combat problems caused in the first place by government-supported foods). No matter the topic, Sen Booker kept coming back to an overarching message about the need for love at this time of great division.

When he did talk about tech, Booker spoke of innovation as a double-edged sword.