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“It’s going to come back and bite them because Congress, in a bipartisan fashion, is going to come back with a vengeance,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO.
The upshot is that Democrats, whose anger at the tech industry had already grown dramatically since the 2016 election, are talking about bringing new levels of control and consequences to business, including stepping up efforts. to reduce or revise liability protections for sites that host violent sites. or dangerous messages.
Democrats have also expressed optimism about securing cooperation from Republicans, despite the Trump-era GOP’s frequent attention to allegations that social media platforms are practicing too much censorship. And some liberal activists have said harnessing online extremism must be a day one priority for President-elect Joe Biden.
Scores of prominent Democrats have berated social media companies – ranging from tech giants like Facebook and YouTube to smaller, freer platforms like Gab and Parler – for not taking stronger action against those who have organized and executed Wednesday’s pro-Trump rally. What started as a protest, with an in-person speech from the president, turned into a veritable storming of the Capitol building that left four people dead.
“Congress was attacked yesterday by a mob that radicalized in an echo chamber created by Facebook and other major platforms,” said Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, who criticized the way whose tech companies amplify potentially harmful content for their users.
The most violent posts before and after the Capitol Swarm on Wednesday appeared on lesser-known platforms that make little to no effort to moderate their content – including Telegram, Parler and TheDonald.win, a site pro- Trump where people openly applauded the prospect of killing liberals and big tech leaders.
But liberal lawmakers was particularly interested in leading companies in the sector, like Facebook and Twitter, for failing to kick Trump from their platforms, despite years of warnings from Democratic leaders, civil rights groups and other advocates that the president’s online rhetoric inspired harm in the real world.
These efforts met with resistance Thursday from a prominent Republican, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington State, who said “censoring” the president would “have serious consequences for free speech that extend well beyond President Trump’s tenure.”
Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit the reach of Trump’s posts after the Capitol riots, imposing temporary locks on his accounts that prevented him from posting.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the platform will block Trump indefinitely, at least until Biden is sworn in, writing that he believes “the risks of allowing the president to continue using our service during this period are just too big “.
A Twitter spokesperson said the company’s public policy, which may exempt officials like Trump from removing and suspending tweets, “ends where we believe the risk of harm is most. high and / or more severe “.
YouTube, meanwhile, removed a video in which Trump continued to broadcast bogus claims of “stolen” elections, and said it would begin to impose potentially permanent suspensions and bans on users who violate anti-government policies. publication of unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, major platforms stepped up their anti-disinformation policies, tagging posts with election-related or disinformation-related content and directing users to sources of information. authoritative information.
But the restrictions and cuts did little to quell critics of Trump and tech companies, who said the measures didn’t go far enough and came far too late.
This week has offered a double boost to the prospects for action: Tuesday’s Democratic sweep of Georgian Senate seats gives the party unified control of Congress for the first time since 2010. And Wednesday’s violence gives Democrats even more power. impetus to use this power to crack down on online extremism.
“It has created a greater urgency and a greater will, hopefully on both sides of the aisle, to dig in and do the hard work that is going to take to fix this problem,” Democratic Representative Jennifer Wexton said. from Virginia. “I think it will be a top priority for us in the 117th to come up with some kind of plan to fight this kind of disinformation.
“The only thing I hope this will do for a lot of people is to show that what happens online is not separate from what happens offline,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of the Initiative for digital innovation and democracy at the German Marshall Fund. “We saw people who had organized online, come to Washington with their QAnon beliefs and other ideas that they had received on social media and put them into practice in the real world.”
One area several Democrats said was now even more ripe for Congressional action: overhauling legal protections for the tech industry under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 Act very controversial that protects platforms from liability for material posted by their users.
“The events of yesterday will renew and focus the need for Congress to reform the privileges and obligations of Big Tech,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “It begins with reforming Section 230, preventing fundamental rights violations, stopping the destructive use of Americans’ private data, and other obvious harm.”
Malinowski, who introduced legislation with Representative Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) To revoke these protections in cases where platforms amplify or reinforce certain harmful content, said the riot on Capitol Hill ‘hastened the need’ ‘such changes to section 230.
Warner said he is working on his own new proposal to revamp Section 230, a goal he has identified as a top priority for this Congress, and that he expects to have “a number of colleagues” to. support the bill. That could make his measure one of the biggest threats to Capitol Hill’s legal shield – and one more plausible than Trump’s unsuccessful demands that Congress repeal the statute entirely to punish so-called anti-Tory bias.
Warner, who is set to lead the Intel Senate once Democrats take control of the chamber, also suggested the subject could be the focus of the group’s activities in Congress. “We’ll have a lot more to say about this,” he said, when asked about his potential hearing plans.
While outrage over how social media companies handled the riot and the events leading up to it was dominated by Democrats, some Republicans believe the events will also propel existing bipartisan efforts to cut content. damaging on social media, according to a GOP aide from Rep. Michael McCaul from Texas.
The Texas Republican, who has spent years chairing the Homeland Security committee, plans to reintroduce a version of a bill to create a clearinghouse at the Department of Homeland Security where social media companies could voluntarily report online threats of impending violence, the staff member said. This center would then forward them to the competent police authorities.
A fatal shooting that killed 23 people in 2019 in El Paso, Texas, prompted the year-long negotiation behind the bill, a process involving both social media companies and civil liberties groups . But McCaul’s aide said if the measure had been in place, it could have helped authorities detect and stave off violence on Capitol Hill this week.
Biden, who burned down Facebook and other social media companies after being accused of voluntarily allowing disinformation in the 2020 election, will also face pressure from advocacy groups to examine how companies are handling violent and deceptive content.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said that in light of Wednesday’s riots, Biden is expected to take immediate action on this front when he is sworn in on Jan.20.
“I think it is essential that the new administration launch from day one a process that examines the rise of extremism and the role of social media companies in contributing to it,” said Greenblatt, suggesting that the vice president elected Kamala Harris could lead the task force.
Kornbluh, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, suggested that Silicon Valley tech companies might actually welcome the opportunity to do their own reset as Washington’s power dynamics shift. “To turn the page,” she said, “and adopt some of these pro-transparency policies that would crack down on disinformation and conspiracy theories and dangerous harassment.”
But Wexton, the Democrat from Virginia, said companies may not have much choice in the matter.
“They can be on the train or below,” she said.
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