“It’s going to come back and bite them, because Congress will come back with revenge in a twofold way,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO.
As a result, Democrats, whose anger in the technology industry has escalated dramatically since the 2016 election, are talking about new levels of scrutiny and consequences for companies, including efforts to protect liability for sites that offer violence sharpen or refurbish. or dangerous messages.
Democrats also expressed optimism about Republican cooperation, despite the GOP being regularly placed in Trump on allegations that social media platforms practice too much censorship. And some liberal activists have said that online extremism should one day be a priority for President-elect Joe Biden.
A number of prominent Democrats have reprimanded social media companies – ranging from technology giants like Facebook and YouTube to smaller, more freewheeling platforms like Gab and Parler – for no longer taking strong action against those who attended Wednesday’s pro-Trump rally arranged and executed. What began with a protest with a personal speech by the president escalated into a complete storm of the Capitol building that left four people dead.
“Congress was attacked yesterday by a mob radicalized in an echo chamber created by Facebook and other major platforms,” said New Jersey Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski. He criticized the way in which technology companies are amplifying potentially harmful content for their users.
The most violent messages before and after the Capitol desert on Wednesday appeared on lesser-known platforms that make little or no effort to moderate their content – including Telegram, Parler and TheDonald.win, a pro-Trump website where people prospect of killing liberals and major technical executives.
But liberal legislators focused especially on the leading companies in the industry, like Facebook and Twitter, because they did not kick Trump off their platforms, despite years of warnings from Democratic leaders, civil rights groups and other advocates that the president’s online rhetoric is doing real harm.
These efforts were resisted on Thursday by one of the top Republicans, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of the state of Washington, which said that the president “censorship” “will have serious consequences for freedom of speech that will extend far beyond President Trump’s term.”
Facebook and Twitter have taken unprecedented steps to limit the reach of Trump’s messages after the riots in the Capitol, temporarily closing his accounts that prevented him from posting.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on 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 our service during this period’ to use is simply too big. ‘
A Twitter spokesman said the company’s policy on public interest, which could exempt public officials like Trump from removing and suspending tweets, “ends where we believe the risk of harm is higher and / or worse.”
YouTube, meanwhile, filmed a video in which Trump continued to incite false allegations of a ‘stolen’ election, saying it would begin imposing suspensions and potentially permanent bans on users who violate the policy against incompetents. claims for election fraud.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, major platforms have stepped up their policy against misinformation, by tagging messages containing election-related content or pointing misinformation and users to authoritative news sources.
But the restrictions and removals did little to help critics of Trump and the tech companies, who said the moves did not go far enough and came too late.
This week, the prospects for action offer a double boost: Tuesday’s Democratic expulsion of Senate seats in Georgia gives the party, for the first time since 2010, uniform control over Congress. And Wednesday’s violence gives the Democrats another impetus to use the force to fight the battle. online extremism.
“It creates a greater urgency and a greater willingness, hopefully on both sides of the aisle, to dig in and do the hard work needed to tackle it,” the Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton said. of Virginia. “I think it’s going to be a top priority for us in the 117th to come up with a plan to deal with this kind of disinformation.”
“The only thing I hope this is done for many people is to show what is happening online is not separate from what is happening offline,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund , said. “We saw people who organized online come to Washington with their QAnon beliefs and their other ideas that they got on social media and track them down in the real world.”
One area that several Democrats have said is now even more ripe for congressional action: the review of the legal protection of the technology industry under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the much-discussed 1996 law that protects platforms from liability for material they users instead.
“Yesterday’s events will renew and refocus the need for Congress to reform the privileges and obligations of Big Tech,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “It begins with the reform of Section 230, the prevention of infringements of fundamental rights, the destruction of the use of Americans’ private data and other significant damage.”
Malinowski, who co-legislated with Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) to revoke protection in cases where platforms reinforce or reinforce certain harmful content, said the riot at the Capitol “the need for such changes to Article 230” hurry.
Warner said he was working on his own new proposal to revise Section 230, a target he identified as the highest priority for this Congress, and that he expected a number of colleagues to support the bill. This could make his benchmark one of the biggest threats to the legal shield on Capitol Hill – and a more plausible way than Trump’s unsuccessful demands that Congress completely revoke the statute to punish alleged anti-conservative prejudice.
Warner, who plans to send Senate Intel as soon as the Democrats take over the chamber, also suggested that the topic could be a major focal point of the panel’s activities in Congress. “We have a lot more to say about this,” he said when asked about his possible hearing plans.
While the anger over how social media companies are handling the riot and the events that led to it is being dominated by Democrats, some Republicans believe the events will also fuel the existing dual efforts to limit harmful content on social media, according to An IDP Assistant to Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas.
The Texas Republican, who has chaired the Homeland Security Committee for many years, plans to draft a version of a bill to create a clean house at the Department of Homeland Security where social media companies voluntarily make online threats from may report imminent violence, the staff member said. The center will then distribute it to appropriate law enforcement agencies.
A fatal shooting that killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas in 2019 motivated the years-long negotiations behind the bill, a process involving social media companies and civil liberties groups. But the McCaul assistant said that if the measure was in place, it could help authorities detect and ward off the violence at the Capitol this week.
Biden, who has scolded Facebook and other social media companies over allegations that they deliberately made disinformation possible in the 2020 election, will also come under pressure from advocacy groups to investigate how companies handle violent and misleading content.
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said that in light of the riots Wednesday, Biden should act immediately on that front when he is sworn in on January 20.
“I think it’s critical for the new government on day one to launch a process that investigates the rise of extremism and the role of social media companies in contributing to it,” Greenblatt said. , with the idea that Kamala Harris, elected vice president, could lead the task force.
Kornbluh, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, suggested that Silicon Valley technology companies could in fact welcome the opportunity to make their own reset as power dynamics change in Washington. “To take a turn,” she said, “and to apply some of these transparency policies that will suppress disinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories and harassment.”
But Wexton, the Virginia Democrat, said businesses may not have much of a choice.
“They could be in the train or down there,” she said.