FCC Commissioner Calls For More Transparency, Accountability From Facebook

This week, Facebook was rocked by a bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal detailing how the social media giant has known for years that its services can be harmful for young users. Meanwhile, another report revealed that the company has quietly allowed more than 5.8 million prominent users to avoid the content moderation rules that govern the rest of us. All of it has led some prominent experts and lawmakers to finally become fed up — including FCC commissioner Brendan Carr.

In an interview this week, Carr slammed Facebook for deceiving congress about what it knew regarding the harm its services can cause. He also not-so-subtly called for the government to step in and regulate the company once and for all.

“We’ve never had an entity like social media where there’s this big of a gap between the power that they have, the control that they have, and accountability. It is just simply a wide, wide chasm,” Carr told Fox Business. “We need to come forward with a comprehensive framework that gets more transparency, more accountability, some basic antidiscrimination rules, more user empowerment. So you’re in control of what you see, not the social media companies themselves.”

This seems like a dramatic action, and it has yet to gain any serious traction with U.S. lawmakers. However, with more prominent figures like Carr calling for it, it may only be a matter of time before Facebook is finally reined in.




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