Though it has been lost in the mists of other scandals, back in 2014, Facebook was in the middle of what was then the most significant public relations ordeal in business history. That June, a Facebook data scientist and two academics released a paper demonstrating that users could be mentally controlled based upon the info Facebook’s engineers fed into their accounts.
The conclusions of the research study were worrying. Not only might Facebook control its users; it had manipulated them, without any regard to the ethical ramifications.
A firestorm of criticism and user fury occurred. Then, in December 2015, The Guardian reported that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had collected “mental information” from countless Facebook users for his governmental campaign, relying on a little firm known as Cambridge Analytica.
These were the days before Facebook had been weaponized to prompt genocide in Myanmar or livestream mass shootings in New Zealand or proliferate the far-right propaganda that assisted elect Donald Trump. There were plenty of indicators that something was amiss with the world’s most popular social network– which was already under a November 2011 consent order from the Federal Trade Commission needing the business to take better care of user information and personal privacy.
At that time, Kamala Harris was the leading state law enforcement official supervising Facebook and every other significant tech company in Silicon Valley. As chief law officer of California, she possessed sweeping powers to restrain the growing power of those tech platforms.
” There’s a lot that attorney generals of the United States throughout the country might have done to check Big Tech,” according to Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank. “A lot of especially, challenging the Instagram and WhatsApp mergers.”
Harris, like federal regulators in the Obama administration, never ever confronted these metastasizing dangers to American democracy from either an antitrust or a customer security viewpoint.
Those acquisitions took location in 2012 and 2014, throughout Harris’ tenure as AG. And yet Harris, like federal regulators in the Obama administration, never faced these metastasizing risks to American democracy from an antitrust perspective, nor brought legal action against them on customer defense grounds.
More than 1,400 pages of emails acquired through a Freedom of Details Act demand aid explain this inaction, revealing that Harris typically viewed Big Tech as a partner rather than a threat. At times, she even teamed up with tech companies to market herself as an increasing star in American politics– a depiction that proved appropriate with her election to the Senate in2016
Today, Harris is a leading contender for the Democratic Celebration’s vice governmental election. Among the most important questions for the next administration will be how it picks to face the corporate leviathans that have actually concerned control American culture. This look inside Harris’ record with Huge Tech suggests a political leader who identifies with the tech elite and is wary of substantive reform.
Leaning In, Leaning Out
In February 2013, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg composed to Harris requesting a glossy photograph of the AG and a personal anecdote demonstrating how Harris had “leaned in.” Sandberg was searching for stories of powerful females proving their guts in the male-dominated upper tiers of American power, from boardrooms to statehouses. As the top law enforcement authorities in the biggest state in the nation, Harris was a natural target.
The “Lean In” marketing campaign was totally connected to Facebook itself.
Harris passed alon