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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony this week on Capitol Hill turned the Klieg lights on the social media platform’s algorithm that, by design, amplifies dangerous disinformation and lures people to spend more and more time scrolling. The question now is what the Biden Administration will do about it.
White House officials know that the momentum generated by Haugen’s testimony will fade over time and the window of popular support for major structural changes to the technology landscape will close. “The White House, like everyone else in Washington, recognizes that the tide is high and the time for action is now,” Tim Wu, special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, said in a statement to TIME. White House officials are “distressed” by Haugen’s revelations that social media companies’ products are targeting children, Wu said, and “the era of ‘let’s just trust the platforms to solve it themselves’ needs to be over.”
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President Joe Biden wants Congress to strengthen antitrust laws, make sure privacy is better protected, and rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make tech companies more accountable for illegality happening on their platforms, according to Wu. (Legislation addressing some of those actions passed the House Judiciary Committee in June.) White House officials also are looking closely at the Child Online Protection Act, an existing law, to see if the Biden Administration can do more to ensure platforms are complying with those provisions to prevent harming children.
But Biden and congressional lawmakers are juggling competing priorities and slow regulatory processes that threaten to delay or dilute meaningful reforms to take on Big Tech. Congress is consumed with the triple tasks of trying to pass trillions of dollars in infrastructure and social program spending, funding the government beyond Dec. 3 and avoiding a self-inflicted debt default. While both…
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Source : time
