Platforms

Although it is not much to look at now, as of the week of Sept 24 the "War Room" will be Facebook’s headquarters for safeguarding elections.

Two days after saying an “invite will be on its way” to Google to respond to allegations of bias against conservatives, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the plan is still in progress. “Well, I gotta sit down and talk to them about it, but there’s a number of committees that have jurisdiction, there’s three off the top of my head, and they could come and we could make it three committees, or one committee, but they need to come and testify,” he said. According to Rep McCarthy, his office has been “in communications” with Google.

The Justice Department has received “an increased level of interest from state attorneys general” for its Sept. 25 meeting on “tech companies, competition, and free exchange of ideas.” The DOJ said it invited a bipartisan group of 24 state AGs to the meeting, which comes amid an avalanche of conservative allegations of tech company bias (which the companies firmly deny). According to a Justice Department official, that group includes Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson (R), California’s Xavier Becerra (D), Washington’s Bob Ferguson (D) and Texas’ Ken Paxton (R).

The Trump Administration appears to be following through on the president’s threats to online freedom of speech. The attorney general of the United States is convening a meeting with state attorneys general  “to discuss a growing concern that these companies may be…intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” Five Republican state attorneys general have been invited to attend so far.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slammed Google as part of his ongoing criticism of the company's alleged bias against conservatives, mentioning its work with China, its search results accidentally showing one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party as “Nazism”, and for work it did to mobilize the Latino vote. “It’s their own executive that they said they have a silent donation where they tried to help people to help Hillary,” he said, referencing a report by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that described an email sent by Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.

Several potential presidential candidates for the 2020 election have expressed an interest in policies that would battle monopolies in the US, including in the tech industry, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute. “Well more than six of the likely presidential candidates this next time around, we’ve had extensive conservations with about these issues,” he said.

Facebook  gave a "false rating" to an article after the Weekly Standard, a conservative publication used by Facebook as a fact checker, claimed the article was incorrect. The article in question, published by ThinkProgress, was titled, "Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v.

Like it or not, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a gatekeeper. The era when Facebook could learn by doing, and fix the mistakes later, is over. The costs are too high, and idealism is not a defense against negligence. In some sense, the “Mark Zuckerberg production”—as he called Facebook in its early years—has only just begun. Zuckerberg is not yet thirty-five, and the ambition with which he built his empire could well be directed toward shoring up his company, his country, and his name.

Democratic attorneys general from key states said they have not yet been invited by the Justice Department to its upcoming review of tech companies, prompting criticism that the Trump administration's inquiry is a politically-charged attack on the tech industry. 

A Department of Justice spokesman said in a statement on Sept 5 that Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to convene a meeting with state attorneys over concerns tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are “hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” The Trump Administration is unlikely to prove specific charges, but that’s not the point, said Alex Abdo, a senior staff attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute.