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December 27, 2020 12:04 am

Will America's Next President Break Up Facebook?

With 25 days until Joe Biden becomes America's next president, Politico writes that throughout the US government, "From lawmakers on Capitol Hill to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission, Washington is training its sights on the world's largest social network like never before."Biden's antitrust enforcers will take ownership of a lawsuit the FTC filed this month threatening to dismantle the sprawling company. And his staff will negotiate legislative proposals with congressional leaders who have hammered Facebook for mishandling its users' personal data and spreading hate speech and dangerous falsehoods. It's a historic moment of legislative and regulatory upheaval with profound consequences for Facebook and its Silicon Valley brethren. The Trump era opened the floodgates for Facebook detractors, who accused the world's largest social network of silencing conservatives on one side, and abetting disinformation about the U.S. election on the other. Now, under Biden, the company's critics see a prime opportunity to finally tame Facebook — for the sake of election integrity, privacy and fair play in the digital era... "It's just not a great business strategy to piss off the incoming president," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, which has advocated for antitrust enforcement against Facebook, Google and other big tech firms. She and other tech critics are putting pressure on Biden to take a different approach than past administrations, and they already have several allies advising the transition as it prepares to take over next month... The now-president-elect has called for the internet industry's sacred legal liability protections to be revoked, specifically citing Facebook's handling of election-related misinformation. He turned heads in January when he said bluntly, "I've never been a fan of Facebook," a company whose digital reach helped propel the Obama-Biden ticket to the White House in past elections... "[I]t's certainly possible that skepticism about Facebook from the Biden team could result in a greater likelihood of antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department and the FTC," said Matt Perault, a former Facebook public policy director who now leads Duke University's Center on Science and Technology Policy. "And it's possible that a Biden White House could use their bully pulpit to try to force changes that they can't achieve through executive action or legislation...." Republicans, too, have gripes about Facebook's handling of political speech, with some saying its lack of meaningful competition gives it the leverage to censor users' political views. After the FTC and state attorneys general announced their Facebook lawsuits this month, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed support... But bipartisan frustration with tech has yet to mean lawmakers will set aside partisan differences. Both sides have been frustrated with how Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube police political content, for instance, but Democrats want more moderation and Republicans have called for less... Even with such divisions, the general animosity toward Facebook could help the anti-Facebook advocates to gain traction with the new administration. And they're pushing their agenda hard ahead of the inauguration.

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