Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says Social Media Badly Wants “Guardrails,” Notably After 1/6 Riot Was Largely “Deliberate and Developed By way of Social Media”

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Below is a video and some highlights from Senator Mark Warner’s interview with the UK Infotagian program. As the description of the show says:

“For this special 50th episode, Damian Collins MP is joined by Senator Mark Warner. Senator Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was one of the leading voices in the campaign to combat social media regulation and combat disinformation. He is currently a sponsor of the new Safe Tech Act legislation in the United States. This particular episode was recorded at the Voxpod studio in London. “

Collins began the show by introducing Sen. Warner as “one of the world
leading voices pointing out disinformation on social media and the harm it can cause
individual citizens and democracy. “Collins added that Sen. Warner is” Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and sponsor of a new Safe Tech Act designed to limit social media companies’ liability for content on their platforms. ” Which, from what we saw on January 6, 2021, is obviously badly needed for a variety of reasons. Check out the video below for a few more highlights from this fascinating, important interview.

Sen. Warner: “I think we have unfortunately seen the power of these social media companies in the US. While we were sounding the alarm, Congress has done virtually nothing from a legislative perspective. “

Sen. Warner: “I think most of the west we are still fighting for it
What will the legislative solution be? “

Sen. Warner: “We saw – whether in Myanmar … Brazil … in the Philippines …Authoritarian regimes around the world use social media both anti-democratically and, in many cases, violently. And I fear that Western democracies are still lagging behind social media companies. And In the US at least, our idea that we have to rely on the goodwill of a certain number of CEOs to make the right decision is wrong, in my opinion. And we’ve seen some companies like Facebook say they welcome regulation now … In the UK, America, EU, capitalized, We need to find a legal framework so that people can continue to use these platforms to express their views, but to put in place some guard rails. “

Sen. Warner on January 6th, 21: “Well, Damian, it was a breathtaking day. I think it will go down in American history, perhaps with not quite the same vigor as 9/11, but it will go down
In American history … with all due respect to our friends from Great Britain, it was the first time the American capital was burned or looted since British troops did so in the inconvenience of the so-called War of 1812 … I felt especially upset about it. .. pictures of these thugs walking through the halls of the Capitol and those pictures are literally blinking
All over the world and in many ways that was incredible fodder for people like Vladimir Putin that could indicate that these Western democracies are nothing special about them. And in so many ways that the uprising was planned and developed through social media, both traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, But it has also been planned and endorsed on some secondary sites like Parler, and I think some of the actual training and real design was even done on the dark web. So President Trump had called this crowd together it had been linked through social media. All of this makes it even more important that the American Congress must finally try to put some guard rails around social media … “

Sen. Warner: “A lot of my European friends don’t understand why we can’t say that
Some guard rails in place. We have the first amendment in America to justify this right to speak. My belief is that the first amendment guarantees your right to say stupid things, ignorant things, crazy things. But that right does not extend to it Kind of comment amplified four billion times on Facebook. The way we tried to thread that needle – and there are a myriad of other legislative approaches from the repeal of Section 230 that would then put these platforms on the same level of liability as a television station or newspaper … in the late 1990s When these platforms first came out, the idea that they were just stupid whistles … and that the operator of the telecommunications company or the operator of those social media companies shouldn’t be responsible, maybe some worth, there these companies in the US started in the late 1990s. By the 2020s, when these companies have as much power as any other company in the world – in America, 65 percent of Americans get some or all of their messages from Facebook, YouTube, and Google – they are not stupid pipes; There is a wide variety of messages available about what type of messages you are receiving. And I feel that the decision that Facebook, Twitter and Google are making is not that they bring a certain political bias left or right, but a bias that reinforces your views. If you lean to the left, you will hear more messages from the left. If you … lean to the right, you will hear the opposite. “

Sen. Warner: “So we tried to say in section 230 that the first adjustment right exists, but there are certain areas that this section should not apply to. And let me give you three or four examples. First, section 230 should not apply to commercial advertising on the Internet. If Facebook gets revenue from a company, that is Facebook shouldn’t be advertised in front of a financial scam on the internet the illegality that emerges from this paid advertising… number two, there are enormous problems in both the UK and the US Cyber ​​bullying, abuse … We say if you can seek injunctive relief in a judicial system, Section 230 should not protect you from injunctive relief. Number three, we also said that our civil rights laws shouldn’t be banned in order to be enforced. Many of these websites preach extremely racist and hateful behavior.This type of speech would violate civil rights law if you were to make these statements in any other setting. So we said that civil rights laws should be included… This is not a perfect solution, but I have a feeling that it cannot be completely reversed. They say let’s go ahead and take care of this
Basic requirement for Section 230, First Amendment Protection, but exempting these protections from certain activities. And in the United States there is a precedent for this because we’ve already banned child pornography, we banned the sex trafficking, we
I banned the production of bombs … “

Sen. Warner: “I’m still trying to work through the reinforcement problem in my head. I mean,
that would be another way of saying within the American structure, okay, You have a first change …[to] Say stupid stuff but you don’t have the right to have it amplified four billion times. “

Sen. Warner: “There are a number of people in the United States and legislative efforts are being made to do so
Say you know less about content and more about the size and power of these companies. So Let’s apply our antitrust laws in America and resolve them. I’m not quite in this camp yet. But if we can’t find a way to deal with their size and power, I’m open to it. I have also put forward a number of legislative proposals, which are more like what I am putting in the middle, which would be trying to say How do we encourage additional competition? One would be … there is nothing wrong with Facebook or Google monetizing our personal information and personal data, but I think we as consumers should have a right to know what that data is worth. So I have a data valuation calculation.… the companies hate it because they don’t want to tell … the consumer … because in some ways we are not customers but really products for those companies … third, from a pro-competitive standpoint, as you know, my background in it was telecommunications, and it was in America used to be very difficult to switch from one telecommunications company to another until we had what is called number portability so you could switch from one company to another and keep the same phone number, so you didn’t bother to re-educate all of your friends . We have laws that also say that if you get tired of how Facebook treats you, you can easily move all of your data to a new website and still have interoperability with the friends and family who would stay on Facebook … “

Senator Warner: “I hope the administration is moving. My belief was The platform companies took advantage of the malfunction of the US Congress and asked for some time out of legislation. It could come back and bite them, because by the time we finally regulate we will probably have a much stricter regime than if we had started years earlier … “

Sen. Warner: “We all want a world, regardless of what our laws or constitutions say, in which people can speak freely, exchange ideas and actually have the right to say things
that other people disagree, but at the same time Social media must not become a place dominated by hate speech, disinformation, and organizations that most cyber warriors can mobilize to support their cause. And then you could end up with what happened on January 6th, where I think we need to worry not only about the events of that day, but the drumbeat of information that led to it … what we are here refer to as domestic violent extremists This is not a purely American phenomenon. There may not be similar people in Britain in the same number, but we see a large part of this activity in Germany, in Eastern Europe, we often see that they are reinforced by Russia. “

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