It was only a matter of time.
A significant number of politicos and journalists still hold the view that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election partly because voters were hoodwinked by viral “fake news” stories shared on social media.
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Many of these same reporters and pundits also argue the Trump campaign’s successful harnessing of Facebook user data, which it obtained legally for the purposes of micro targeting, contributed to Clinton’s eventual defeat.
Sticking to these claims, which are tenuous at best (and more likely just laughable), is probably easier than admitting the uncomfortable truth that Trump won because his well-funded opposition was grossly incompetent and overconfident.
Seeing as how the free flow of information is being blamed for Clinton’s stunning and easily avoidable defeat, I guess it was only a matter of time before the vanquished began floating the idea of regulating social media companies and clamping down on Silicon Valley.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example, suggested this week that the government should form something like the Federal Communications Commission, but for tech companies.
“[R]ight now actually have, you know, virtually no regulation, I believe, and I’ve said this publicly, that what we need for the social media platforms is something akin to the Federal Communications Commission, which was set up in the 1920s to regulate radio and later television,” he said Thursday in a radio interview.
He added, “We have nothing comparable for the social media platforms. And as we’ve seen, they’d like to just regulate themselves. I believe they need oversight and regulation from the government.”
Clapper continued, arguing the country’s in a “bad place” so far as Silicon Valley’s ability to operate freely is concerned.
Interestingly enough, he’s not alone in this thinking.
Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor for President Obama, told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell earlier this week that it “worries” him that the government doesn’t have more control over what is shared on social media.
He began by bemoaning that official White House statements during the 2016 election didn’t specifically address the “fake news” that popped up around the Democratic nominee.
“[We] didn’t really address … the fact that people’s social media feeds were being polluted by this Russian-created content favoring Donald Trump,” he said.
“The government didn’t also have a lot of capacity to deal with this. We can’t edit people’s Facebook feeds and say ‘that’s fake news, and that’s not’. And what worries me today, Andrea, is that we still don’t have a lot of capacity, and frankly our government’s probably not doing anything to prevent this,” Rhodes said in an interview with the MSNBC host on Wednesday.
He concluded, “And so the likelihood that the Russians are going to do this in the midterm elections, in the next presidential election, is very high.”
Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Give me one more example of a former Obama official proposing stricter government control of Silicon Valley, and we have ourselves a bona fide post-2016 trend.
