Lawmakers Call For Facebook Crackdown After Damning NYT Report

MENLO PARK, CA -- Following a New York Times report about Facebook's public and private persona during crises associated with Russian election interference among other issues being scrutinized, some U.S. lawmakers are once again revealing their desire to take action against the social media giant.

The damning report listed here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/ takes a fine-toothed comb through Facebook's efforts to downplay concerns over the issues that threaten American democracy. For one thing, users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, the Times reported.

With that, Facebook deflected blame, the newspaper contends.

The stock, in direct correlation, significantly dropped.

Given the past in which founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before a committee, Congress has asked for enhanced privacy regulations and increased transparency related to political ad spending on social media. Some members such as Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island and ranking member on the House Antitrust Subcommittee, suggested a possible breakup of the Menlo Park tech company based on antitrust violations.

Cicilline said on Twitter that Facebook "cannot be trusted to regulate itself."

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has already co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would require Facebook to disclose political advertising on the site. Klobuchar has asked the social media company this week to respond to allegations "the company used contractors to retaliate against or spread intentionally inflammatory information about their critics," a statement from her office read. The senator cites recent reports alleging the company has not taken enough steps to protect the data of its 2.2 billion users.

To its credit, Facebook has introduced a political ad archive that has been shown to contain false or misleading information. It created a War Room before the midterm election to monitor unscrupulous online activity and has since taken down hundreds of pages from bad actors on the site.

Requests for comment to Facebook were unreturned.

Facebook provided the New York Times with a statement reading: "This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire managemenet team has been focused on tackling the issues we face. While these are hard problems, we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors."

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