Attorney General William Barr said in the next few weeks he would likely decide on “actions” for the Justice Department to take in its broad investigation of big tech companies.
Barr talked about how the agency has ramped up efforts to scrutinize social media and internet companies during Thursday’s episode of the Verdict podcast with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
“There’s sort of a couple of lines being pursued. We have an antitrust investigation of all the major internet platforms or most of the major internet platforms, and that’s very much underway,” Barr said. “I expect to be making decisions in the next few weeks about actions on that. I think during the summer, we’ll see some developments.”
Last summer, the Justice Department opened a sweeping antitrust review into online platforms, potentially threatening some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. The tech giants under scrutiny likely include Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have said both Facebook and Amazon should be split up. Republicans, too, have raised concerns that major online companies have gained too much power.
All 50 state attorneys general and territories banded together in September to begin an antitrust investigation into Google, and the Justice Department is exploring filing an antitrust lawsuit against Google and others.
Barr turned his attention to social media companies such as Twitter, asserting on the podcast that “these behemoths have gotten vast, strong control over the expression of views and the public forum here in the United States.” He said they got to the powerful positions they are in through “the biggest bait-and-switch in history.”
“They got there by saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to be open to all views, you know, come join us because then you can have your views.’ So they built up this powerful network, very strong market power based on the representation that they were sort of open to all,” Barr argued, adding, “But then when they got that market power … and they’re now censoring views. And so we’re getting increasingly monolithic viewpoints being presented to the American people rather than the kind of robust debate.”
Last week, the Justice Department issued a report proposing that the laws governing internet companies, specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, should be reformed and some immunities be rolled back to incentivize internet businesses to be “responsible actors.”
The Justice Department’s report came shortly after President Trump’s late May executive order, which claimed that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube “wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events” and that “online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse.”
Barr said on the podcast that one of the proposed reforms is that social media companies will “have to show that what they took down they had reasonable grounds for saying it violated their terms of service” and they would “have to give notice and process to people’s whose content they take down.” Republicans have argued that Section 230 needs to be updated in light of claims that social media companies unfairly censor conservative content or ban conservative users.
The attorney general also touched on the violence that has hit cities nationwide the past month.
“We are seeing strong evidence of coordination in many of these violent episodes,” he said, adding, “a number of them are associated with the movement called antifa, but they go by various names, but frequently anarchistic.”
Barr previously referred to a “witch’s brew” of extremist groups involved in the protests, and the Justice Department recently arrested members of the extremist ‘boogaloo’ movement.
Barr also called the Trump-Russia investigation “one of the largest frauds and injustices in American history” and said he was committed to “trying to get to the bottom of that and hold accountable the people that were involved.”
