From left, Colin Stretch, general counsel for Facebook, Sean Edgett, acting general counsel for Twitter, and Richard Salgado, director of law enforcement and information security at Google, are sworn in before the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer questions related to Russian use of social media on Nov. 1, 2017. Joshua Roberts, Reuters file
NBC: Should Washington begin regulating Facebook? Some lawmakers say yes.
WASHINGTON — For weeks, Facebook has been under intense scrutiny in Washington after revelations about Russian attempts to use the platform to influence the 2016 elections. Now, some lawmakers are talking about turning that scrutiny into action.
There are new calls on Capitol Hill for stronger federal regulation of Facebook, possibly requiring greater transparency and disclosures for digital political ads. But lawmakers have yet to take up more sweeping reforms that some internet policy experts and advocates believe are necessary to protect users of the social-media platform, given Facebook’s outsize influence and vast stores of personal data.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: If there is one thing that governments hate .... it is not being able to control the message. Social media does provide a platform where alternative messages can be disseminated .... and not surprising governments like China, Russia, Iran, etc. have all moved to regulate it. And now .... not surprising .... U.S. lawmakers want to do the same thing, starting with regulating advertising. From the looks of it .... there is bipartisan support to impose some form of regulation, and I will not be surprised if they succeed in imposing rules and regulations on political advertising. But my gut is telling me that they will not stop there .... the goal is to regulate the content .... specifically content that focuses on politics. The question is .... how can it be done without producing a constitutional challenge on free speech .... and will they succeed. On that question .... I am not sure of the answer but if I was to make a prediction, they will do it like this .... Eric Schmidt Says Google News Will 'Engineer' Russian Propaganda Out of the Feed (MotherBoard). More here .... Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find – Eric Schmidt (RT). In short .... you can post your content, but the search engines (including the search engines that Social Media use) will ignore you.
3 comments:
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."
Benjamin Franklin.
We are going in the wrong direction.
Use duckduckgo
IMHO Google is right there with FB. Both are behaving just like the monopolies from a hundred years ago.
Regulation happens when companies like Google an facebook act as arbiters of their content. (restricting pay on channels that their minions disagree with)
They will now stop being private entities and begin being public utilities.
Post a Comment