According to the Biden administration, now is the time for the government to step in and control Facebook in order to eliminate independent media for good.
In response to Facebook’s worldwide outage and testimony from a whistleblower on Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that social media corporations need to be nannied by the government in order to more effectively eliminate “hate speech” and “misinformation.”
“This is just the latest in a series of revelations about social media platforms,” Psaki told reporters on Monday when asked about Zuckerberg’s whistleblower troubles.
These “revelations,” Psaki added, “make clear that self-regulation is not working. That’s long been the president’s view and been the view of the administration.”
Psaki said the administration will continue to support efforts by Congress to pass “fundamental reforms” in the Big Tech field.
Rt.com reports: Numerous Democrat lawmakers have called for more oversight over companies like Facebook, as well as more stringent rules about what can be posted, while Republicans have blasted most major tech companies of using campaigns against hate and ‘misinformation’ as ways to ban conservative opinions and users, especially ones that criticize government health officials on Covid-19 data and regulations.
Facebook has said it is dealing with its outages, though it’s unclear why the services have been down. Reports have begun emerging about businesses and individuals also having difficulty accessing their Gmail and Twitter accounts, as well as other social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.
On the outages, Psaki could offer no specific insight and only said the administration is “aware” of and is “monitoring” the situation.
