Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, I want to express to the Senator from Texas our concern and our thoughts for all of those who have been so impacted. Digital Responsibility

Madam President, the Senator from Texas mentioned the floods and the impact that had happened. I found out about some of the good work of the Good Samaritans in the area by watching what was taking place on social media, and I am certain millions of Americans saw firsthand some of the generosity and the help that was given there.

Indeed, the internet and social media platforms have transformed the way we communicate, the way we send out information, and many times the way we receive it. Correspondence that, just a few years ago, would have taken pen, paper, and postage is now sent and received with a simple click of a mouse.

Everything happens online, from communicating about disasters to shopping to party planning and to campaigning. We share photos and milestones with our ``friends.'' We let people know that we are OK in times of disasters or that we need help. We share all of this not only with our friends, but we are also sharing it with companies that have built multibillion-dollar empires based on their ability to convince us to surrender just one more little piece of unique data about us or about our families.

Beyond social media, we live our everyday transactional lives online also. We bank via apps. We sign up for credit cards using codes we have received in an email and manage our finances with cloud-based software. Information we once would have locked securely in a desk drawer, we now plug into an online forum without ever giving it a second thought.

We have contributed to our own, as I call it, ``virtual you''; that is, our personal online footprint unique to us, unique only to us. We have done this by trusting these platforms to keep our data secure. In a way, this level of connectivity and trust has made life a lot easier and more convenient, but it has also made us vulnerable to exploitation and exposure.

I have spoken before about consumers' justifiable expectation of a right to privacy online. This year, I introduced the BROWSER Act, which I had previously introduced when I was in the House. It is an effort to codify this right to privacy that consumers expect. BROWSER gives Big Tech basic guidelines to follow when collecting and selling user data, and that user is you.

It has become understood that you are the product when you are using these social media apps and experiencing this connectivity. You are the product. You have the right to know that you are that product, and you have the right to decide what is shared about your life. But protecting an individual's data is only part of this picture.

Last week, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology held a hearing to address the role that digital services play in the distribution of violent and extremist content. We welcomed testimony from Facebook, Twitter, and Google, detailing what they are doing to remove extremist content on platforms.

I will tell you, before we talk about policing content, we, as Members of this body, need to make sure we understand how the American people view their use of social media and the internet.

Whether social media platforms should be regulated under the First Amendment is beside the point. Americans view these services as open public forums, where they can speak their minds on everything from defense funding to the Emmy Awards. These consumers don't want the Wild West, nor do they want to be censored based on a content reviewer's subjective opinion. What they want is an objective cop on the beat-- just as in the public square, an objective cop on the beat who is equipped to properly identify incitement, threats, and other types of speech that could put lives at risk.

This, of course, is easier said than done. In the case of Facebook, for example, that translates to creating a set of standards that 30,000 in-house engineers and analysts and 15,000 content reviewers will be able to apply--45,000 people, and that is just one platform.

There is a reason that time and again Big Tech executives look at Congress and say ``Oh, more regulatory control over the way we do business,'' and it is this: Policing legitimately dangerous content is a big job, and policing ``awful but lawful'' content as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it, is an even bigger, more daunting task.

It takes 45,000 people to do a bare-minimum job for one company. Imagine trying to create easy-to-understand, bright-line standards that 45,000 employees will be able to digest and apply quickly enough to keep up with the flow of content. That has to be an intimidating task.

I will tell you, if those executives think the government could do a better job of deciding down to the letter what those standards should be, I think they are mistaken. Only the engineers and innovators know their companies well enough to set their own internal policies for acceptable uses of their platform, but that is not to say that I will not be taking an interest in their ideas.

We need to have a Federal standard of privacy and data security. We need to review censorship and prioritization, competition, and antitrust.

For example, Facebook is in the process of putting together a content oversight board to adjudicate users whose posts have been deemed in violation and taken down. They have pledged to make the identities of the moderators and their decisions public--barring any safety risks-- and to choose a diverse panel. The biggest unanswered questions here are these: Will the moderators really reflect the American political spectrum? How will they be chosen? The American people will demand more than a promise to be fair and impartial.

As I said, government cannot make these decisions in total for Big Tech, but we can help guide them along the way by passing privacy and data security standards. This is where working groups like the Judiciary Committee's Tech Task Force come into play.

Last week, I was speaking to a group of private sector tech gurus, and I told them that the only way we will be able to move forward is if the government does more listening and they do more talking and work with us on setting these basic standards.

I stand by what I said. It is not--and should not be--Congress's job to decide in retrospect what sort of culture companies like Facebook and Twitter meant to create. It is imperative that these companies understand the American public views them as a public square, an online public square, and it is up to them to be certain that there is an objective cop on the beat.

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