BYNINA BURLEIGH
@ninaburleigh“This is the biggest thing you
don’t know anything about.” » P.NEWSWEEK.COM 11
since the 2016 election, senator mark
Warner has been Silicon Valley’s most ac-
tive and vocal watchdog on Capitol Hill. Warner,
a Virginia Democrat, vice chairman of the Senate
Committee on Intelligence and a former telecom-
munications venture capitalist, published a white pa-
per last year proposing a variety of legislative curbs
on the tech industry. Those suggestions included put-
ting the onus on Facebook, Twitter and other social
media platforms to identify bots and foreign election
interference. Warner also has bipartisan co-sponsors
for a variety of legislation aimed at
curbing tech, including the so-called
Honest Ads Act, which would require
Facebook, Google and other platforms
to be transparent about who is paying
for political ads.He is clearly onto something. The end of 2019 is
shaping up to be a watershed period for the issue
of how much the U.S. should regulate Silicon Val-
ley. Seven states, led by New York Attorney General
Letitia James, have already announced an antitrust
investigation of Facebook; most of the states’ at-
torneys general are probing Google over anti-com-
petitive behavior. Additionally, the House Judicia-
ry Committee just demanded Amazon, Google and
Facebook hand over the personal emails of those
companies’ executives, hunting for evidence of
anti-competitive schemes.
Warner, in a recent wide-rang-
ing interview with Newsweek, ex-
plains why the era of unregulated
Big Tech may be coming to an end.
Here are some edited excerpts:“The Wild,
Wild West for
These Social
Media Platforms
is Coming
to an End”
Senator Mark Warner says the anything-goes era for Silicon Valley
will soon be over. How is that going to happen?BIG TECH:$
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Photo illustration by GLUEKIT