Forcing TikTok Sale is an Effort to Front Run Trump Presidency
The US House of Representatives bill forcing TikTok owners connected to the Chinese government to sell US operations passed with a super-majority of 90% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats. The bill now moves to the Senate where regulating bias by social media bias is now on the table.
Tech companies are howling that the legislation is racist, an affront to free speech, and an attack on the capitalist free marketplace. But the real issue is that the tech giants are afraid former President Trump will be reelected in November and move to fully eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 that granted Internet companies that host, or moderate content generated by others with legal immunity against free speech bias.
Center for Responsive Politics reported that Internet related tech companies in the 2020 elections made 98% of their $594.4 million individual, PAC and soft money contributions went to Democrats.
The largest tech contributors according to CNBC included Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz who spent about $24 million; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman contributed about $14 million Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and his wife donated about $7 million; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt donated about $6 million; and Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings and his wife donated more than $5 million.
Data brokers have been able to sell or rent almost all Internet data, as long as they deceptively disclosed what they were doing in a long ‘notice and consent’ in small type at the bottom of website landing pages.
As George Washington University Law Professor Johnathon Turley wrote about alleged bias: “The “Twitter files” revealed an FBI operation to monitor and censor social media content — an effort so overwhelming and intrusive that Twitter staff at one point complained internally that “they are probing & pushing everywhere.” The reports have indicated that dozens of FBI employees worked on the identification and removal of material on a wide range of subjects and that Twitter largely carried out their requests.”
The Biden Administration is trying to head off Congressional investigations by instituting some Internet privacy protection rules in cooperation with the Network Advertising Initiative. The trade group that includes data brokers, Google, Adobe and others, announced that they were developing new industry standards for corporations who “collect and process sensitive consumer location data.”
But as reported by Matt Stoller, “Major law firms were sending out alerts out and information to clients telling them to just stop using certain location data to target individuals. It turns out, people really don’t like it when corporations, or employers, abusers, etc know when they go to the doctor, church, a political rally, a gay bar, and so forth.”
In January, the FTC settled a regulatory enforcements against X-Mode Social and InMarket that were selling to the highest bidder “sensitive locations such as medical and reproductive health clinics, places of religious worship and domestic abuse shelters.” The settlement rejected the concept of notice and consent if favor of an “unfairness” standard.
An Idaho Judge in an FTC vs.. Kochava regulatory upheld the unfairness standard in February that banned the vacuuming up and sale of large amounts of sensitive consumer data is illegal.
The biggest FTC consumer protection lawsuit was filed by the Trump Administration against Meta/Facebook in 2020 for engaging in targeted advertising to minors. The litigation is moving toward trial next year seeks to force Facebook to break-up ties to Instagram and WhatsApp
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