“This will come back and bite because Congress, in a bipartisan way, will come back with a vengeance,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat for the Senate Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO.
The result is that Democrats, whose anger in the technology industry had already increased dramatically since the 2016 elections, are talking about bringing new levels of scrutiny and consequences for businesses, including stepping up efforts to restrict or revise liability protections for sites that host violent or dangerous messages.
Democrats also expressed optimism about getting cooperation from Republicans, despite the Trump-era Republican Party’s frequent focus on claims that social media platforms practice too much censorship. And some liberal activists have said that controlling online extremism needs to be a first-day priority for President-elect Joe Biden.
A number of prominent Democrats scolded social media companies – ranging from tech giants like Facebook and YouTube to smaller and freer platforms like Gab and Parler – for not taking more forceful action against those who organized and ran the pro-Trump rally Wednesday. What started as a protest, with an in-person speech from the president, turned into a violent attack on the Capitol building that left four people dead.
“Congress was attacked yesterday by a crowd that radicalized itself in an echo chamber that Facebook and other big platforms have created,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, who criticized the way tech companies potentially amplify content harmful to its users.
The most violent messages before and after the Capitol’s Wednesday swarm 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 openly applauded the prospect of killing liberals and top tech executives.
But liberal lawmakers aimed particularly at industry leading companies, like Facebook and Twitter, for not throwing Trump off their platforms, despite years of warnings from Democratic leaders, civil rights groups and other advocates that the president’s online rhetoric was inspiring damage in the real world.
These efforts met with resistance on Thursday from a top Republican, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington state, which said that “censoring” the president would have “serious consequences for freedom of expression that will extend well beyond President Trump’s mandate.”
Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit the reach of Trump’s messages after the Capitol riots, imposing temporary blocks on their accounts that prevented him from posting.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the platform would block Trump indefinitely, at least until Biden takes office, writing that he believes “the risks of allowing the president to continue using our service during this period are simply great. too much”.
A Twitter spokesman said the company’s public interest policy, which can exempt public officials like Trump from removals and suspensions of tweets, “ends where we believe the risk of harm is greater and / or more serious.”
Meanwhile, YouTube withdrew a video in which Trump continued to make false claims of a “stolen” election and said he would begin imposing potentially permanent suspensions and bans on users who violated policies against posting unfounded election fraud allegations.
During preparations for the 2020 elections, the main platforms reinforced their policies against disinformation, putting labels on posts that contained content related to elections or disinformation and directing users to reliable news sources.
But the restrictions and declines did little to appease critics of Trump and technology companies, who said the measures did not go far enough and arrived too late.
This week offered a double boost to prospects for action: Tuesday’s Democratic sweep of Georgia’s Senate seats gives the party unified control of Congress for the first time since 2010. And Wednesday’s violence gives Democrats even more impetus to use that power to repress extremism online.
“This created greater urgency and greater willingness, hopefully on both sides of the corridor, to dig and do the hard work that will be needed to resolve this,” said Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton from Virginia. “I think it will be a priority for us, at 117, to come up with some kind of plan to deal with this type of misinformation.”
“The only thing I hope will be done for many people is to show that what happens online is not separate from what happens offline,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative. “We saw people who organized online, coming to Washington with their QAnon beliefs and other ideas that they had on social media and represented them in the real world.
One area that several Democrats said was even more ripe for Congressional action: the review of legal protections in the technology industry under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the much-debated 1996 law that protects platforms from liability for material that your users post.
“Yesterday’s events will renew and focus on the need for Congress to reform Big Tech’s privileges and obligations,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “This starts with reforming Section 230, preventing violations of fundamental rights, stopping the destructive use of American private data and other obvious damage.”
Malinowski, who introduced legislation with Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) To revoke these protections in cases where platforms amplify or increase certain harmful content, said that the Capitol riot “accelerates the need” for such changes in Section 230.
Warner said he is working on his own new proposal to reform Section 230, a target he has identified as a top priority for this Congress, and that he hopes to have “several colleagues” supporting the project. This could make his move one of the biggest threats to the statutory shield on Capitol Hill – and more plausible than Trump’s unsuccessful demands that Congress repeal the statute entirely to punish the alleged anti-conservative bias.
Warner, who is expected to lead the Intel Senate as soon as Democrats take control of the House, also suggested that the topic could be a major focus of the panel’s activities at this Congress. “We will have a lot more to say about this,” he said when asked about his potential hearing plans.
While outrage over how social media companies handled the riot and the events that led to it has been dominated by Democrats, some Republicans believe the events will also boost existing bipartisan efforts to contain harmful content on social media, according to with a Republican Party advisor to Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas.
The Texas Republican, who spent years chairing the Homeland Security Committee, plans to reintroduce a version of a bill to create a clearinghouse in the Department of Homeland Security where social media companies can voluntarily report online threats of imminent violence, said the official. That center would then distribute them to law enforcement officials.
A fatal shooting that killed 23 people in 2019 in El Paso, Texas, sparked a year-long negotiation behind the bill, a lawsuit involving social media companies and civil liberties groups. But McCaul’s aide said that if the measure had been in place, it could have helped authorities to detect and prevent violence in the Capitol this week.
Biden, who razed Facebook and other social media companies on charges that they deliberately allowed disinformation in the 2020 elections, will also face pressure from advocacy groups to examine how companies deal with violent and misleading content.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said that, in light of Wednesday’s riots, Biden should take immediate action on that front when he is sworn in on January 20.
“I think it is critical for the new government on the first day to launch a process that examines the rise of extremism and the role of social media companies in contributing to that,” said Greenblatt, suggesting that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris could lead the Task force.
Kornbluh, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, suggested that technology companies in Silicon Valley may indeed welcome the chance to do their own reboot as Washington’s power dynamics change. “Turn the page,” she said, “and adopt some of these pro-transparency policies that would repress misinformation and dangerous conspiracy and harassment theories.”
But Wexton, the Virginia Democrat, said companies may not have much of a choice in the matter.
“They can be on the train or under it,” she said.