GOP Sen. Blackburn: ‘What I Would Like to See Out of Big Tech Is Some Responsibility and Accountability’

Thursday during an interview on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called on big tech companies to take a look at how they manipulate their algorithms, and that might expose minors to various threats on the internet.

Blackburn also suggested those companies take a look at their ratings as well.

“What I would like to see out of big tech is some responsibility and accountability,” Blackburn explained. “And, Maria, they go in and subjectively manipulate their algorithms and then it opens the doors that it ought not to children, like the SnapChat letter that I sent this week deals with the way pornography is made public on their site. And this is made available. The ratings are wrong on these apps. Children are seeing this. They need to adjust those ratings. And, also, parents need to be aware. You need to give parents the tools to block this. These videos that are deleted, this becomes a child predator’s dream for contacting these children. And there are several cases where pedophiles have used SnapChat to contact and to coerce these children.”

The Tennessee Republican mentioned her legislative effort to put in place “guardrails” for big tech.

“The Browser Act is legislation that deals with the privacy issue that I introduced in the House,” she said. “I have reintroduced that in the Senate. And we are working to move that forward to get those guardrails in place and to do that first, like touch, but to put those parameters in place.”

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