Former Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., on Tuesday made his first public appearance since resigning at the beginning of this year following sexual misconduct allegations, using that opportunity to call for more government regulation on tech industry giants.
“Facebook talks about Cambridge Analytica … as if they are isolated bad actors,” Franken said Tuesday at the Xchange Forum 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal. “But as we know… the vulnerabilities that Cambridge Analytica exploited were well known within Facebook and within the developer community.”
The former comedian said looking at regulating tech companies was also important to stop spread of fake news, which he clarified he meant in a different way than Trump means it.
“Now when President Trump uses the term ‘fake news,’ he’s using it to refer to any news story he doesn’t like. Especially news stories that happen to be absolutely true,” Franken said, drawing some laughter.
As Franken served his tenure in the Senate, he was a critic of big tech companies and even lobbied to create the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.
Franken alluded to the fact that he could be stepping back into the public eye, suggesting he was at the conference to do more than just talk and make sure something like the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal doesn’t happen again.
“I’m not just here to cast blame,” Franken said. “I’m here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Absent from his discussion at the conference was any mention of reasoning for leaving his post as U.S. senator just four months ago, or any response to the sexual misconduct allegations against him.
