Elizabeth Warren calls Facebook a threat to democracy
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that Facebook is a threat to democracy, and it is time for the social media giant to be broken up.
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Sen. Warren said on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber:
The only way we’re going to hold them accountable is to break them up. I understand there are people who say, well, maybe we could regulate them a little better, put more cops on the beat. Look, I’m not opposed to that. It’s just not enough to get the job done. We need to break them up. The way we break them up. It’s kind of like with the phone company. You know how you can call me and I can call you even if we don’t use the same telephone carriers? We need to do the same thing with our social media, I can call you and you can call me. Once we make that work and break them apart, now you’ve got 10 providers for the social media services, 50 providers for our social media services. That means I can pick one that says I’m not going to be selling your information to somebody else. The consequence of that is to make the market work better.
The second consequence is to deprive Facebook of the kind of enormous power that it now has. Think what it means that Facebook is scooping in information from every one of our exchanges, scooping it in and using it for its own benefit, for advertising, for selling to third parties. Shoot, for playing footsie with dictators around the world. We need to break that up. I go back to Teddy Roosevelt who said the reason you break up these big monopolies is partly for economic reasons, create competition, but it’s partly because they pose a real political risk to the survival of a democracy. It is time to break up Facebook.
Facebook profited off of and promoted right-wing websites that push propaganda and disinformation that threaten democracy. Facebook is so big that Mark Zuckerberg wants people to believe that he can’t control his own platform.
If this is the case, Sen. Warren is correct. For the good of democracy, the federal government must step in and break up Facebook.
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