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A U.S. Federal Trade Commission official is concerned that a new 129-page report penned by her agency could be easily construed by Big Tech companies to justify the partisan censorship that has plagued their sites for years.
In its “A Look Behind the Scenes: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services” report published last week, the FTC suggests Amazon, Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Twitter, Snap, ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp are guilty of participating in a “vast surveillance” operation.
The comprehensive findings, first commissioned at the end of the Trump administration in December 2020 but released under the Biden administration’s purview, determined this invasion of privacy has not only “harmed our competitive landscape” but also “affected the way we communicate and our well-being, especially the well-being of children and teens” by relying on algorithms that boost “harmful content.”
In her Sept. 19 response to the findings, Commissioner Melissa Holyoak agreed that the findings represent “a major step forward” in the fight to protect Americans’ privacy from the Big Tech companies eager to invade it. Yet, she expressed “grave” concern that the report “is unclear exactly how its analysis or recommendations will affect free speech.”
The report explicitly claims it does “not address or endorse any attempt to censor or moderate content based on political views,” as Big Tech and the Biden administration were caught doing during media-fueled panic over Covid-19.
Holyoak noted, however, that the FTC’s repeated calls
