With Congress trying to figure out what to do about Facebook, a bunch of civil society groups have banded together to point the way.
Forty-plus groups including the Fight for the Future, the Center for Digital Democracy, National Hispanic Media Coalition and Public Knowledge have launched a new campaign to get Congress and the Biden Administration to crack down on the social media giant in particular, and Big Tech's use of data “surveillance” in general.
That comes in the wake of the whistleblower revelations about Instagram that have prompted bipartisan pushback on the social-media giant and promises of investigations and new privacy legislation, or what more than one legislator called Big Tech's ”Big Tobacco moment.“
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The groups want “a full investigation” into Facebook, including subpoenaing documents, a federal data privacy law, and Federal Trade Commission to take enforcement action against surveillance-driven algorithms and data harvesting.
The groups agree that there remains “a fair amount of disagreement,” “both in Congress and among civil society groups,” over how to regulate algorithms, but said there is still a way to get to a federal data-privacy law that could reduce the harms.
