White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently announced that the White House will be endorsing strict regulations on social media platforms in order to hold them accountable for any harm they cause. She adds that President Joe Biden has continued to be a “strong supporter” in reforming tech platforms, including an emphasis on Section 230 reforms, privacy reforms, transparency, and antitrust laws.
Former Facebook product manager and whistleblower Frances Haugen shared before the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday about the mental health and political division created by the social media platform. She accused Facebook of resolving conflicts “in favor” of their own profits and always resulting in more division, lies, harm, threat, and combat. She went on to emphasize how the only way of “fixing the evils” of social media is by putting people like her in charge of regulating it.
“Right now, the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what is happening inside of Facebook, are people who ‘grew up’ inside of Facebook, or Pinterest, or another social media company,” said Haugen.
Others pointed to many problems in this, saying that Big Tech would just be regulating and buying everything paid that they regulate on their site. They said removing the special protections and opening them up to lawsuits could solve the issue, but that adding more government control and regulations would make it worse. If you think about it, the radical left already controls 95% of the mainstream media.
While conservative viewpoints can be expressed, more government regulation would be a step to eliminating freedom of speech (and those the left doesn’t agree with). Numerous Democrats, however, have called for more stringent rules with what can be posted on the platform and have often resulted in using the term ‘misinformation’ as a way to ban conservative opinions.
“This is just the latest in a series of revelations about social media platforms. These revelations make clear that self-regulation is not working. That’s long been the president’s view and been the view of the administration,” Psaki said.
Psaki has offered no further information on the outages that occurred on Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram platforms on Monday. The companies have dealt with plummeting stock and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost nearly $7 billion in less than a 24 hour period. The White House said they will continue efforts to pass “fundamental reform” in Big Tech as they monitor and remain aware of the situation.
Algorithms and strategies have revealed the not-so-pretty side of social media and the White House is looking to push back. It’s going to be interesting to see if lawmakers treat social media platforms like Big Tobacco or just another political tool they can continue to manipulate. Democrats saw the influence of Big Tech censorship during the 2020 presidential election, and particularly when Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and there’s no doubt they won’t be giving that up too easily anytime soon.
