Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance With Silicon Valley
The alliance between Democrats and Silicon Valley has buckled and bent this year amid revelations that platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed hateful speech, Russian propaganda and conservative-leaning “fake news” to flourish.
But those tensions burst into open warfare this past week after revelations that Facebook executives had withheld evidence of Russian activity on the platform for far longer than previously disclosed while employing a Republican-linked opposition research firm to discredit critics and the billionaire George Soros, a major Democratic Party patron.
Democrats now face a painful reckoning with longtime friends in the tech industry, relationships girded by a mutual interest in issues like immigration and cemented with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
The news, reported in a New York Times investigation, elicited fury from Democrats, who demanded a Justice Department investigation into Facebook’s lobbying campaign, as well as new regulations that would cut to the core of Facebook and Google’s data-hungry business models.
It reinforced criticism from the left — by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, among others — that Amazon, Facebook, and Google are unaccountable monopolies, digital analogs to the railroad trusts of the Gilded Age.
And it complicated life for tech’s remaining allies in the party, such as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, a voracious fund-raiser and a tech booster whose relationship with Facebook goes back almost a decade.
“I think 2016 exposed the dark side of technology,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a Bay Area Democrat. Widely considered friendly with the tech industry, Mr. Khanna criticized Facebook on Friday for its aggressive tactics, and said the company should “certainly fire the people who were in any way involved in the decision to peddle opposition research.”
The clash intensified on Friday when four Democratic senators wrote to the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to provide more details about Facebook’s lobbying activities. The lawmakers also raised a potentially more explosive issue: whether Facebook had ever used its own data and platform against critics.
“We need to know if Facebook, or any entity affiliated with or hired by Facebook, ever used any of the vast financial and data resources available to them to retaliate against their critics, including elected officials who were scrutinizing them,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, one of the Democrats who wrote the letter.
https://mfamediagroup.com/facebook-fallout-ruptures-democrats-longtime-alliance-with-silicon-valley/
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