(Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats and Republicans need to come together to pass strong bipartisan legislation in order to hold major tech companies accountable.
Most importantly, Biden said he wanted to see “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy,” including putting limits on how much data like location, biometrics and health information can be collected. He also highlighted the specific risk to children.
“We must hold social-media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit,” he wrote, citing young people’s struggles with bullying, violence, trauma and mental health.
He also urged a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to force tech companies to “take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use.”
Both Republicans and Democrats have spent much of the past several years probing different aspects of the tech sector, largely agreeing that there are problems with the power of Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook and others while largely disagreeing on how to address those problems.
In a statement following the release of the opinion piece, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said she would continue to push for passage of bipartisan legislation she sponsored to bar the companies from favoring their own businesses in search results, among other measures.
(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru and Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Alexandra Alper)
