There should be ‘consequences’ for platforms that don’t remove people like Alex Jones, Senator Ron Wyden says -- Recode

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"Since 2016, everything that social media companies have done has been “either a bizarre idea or not really doing much of anything that’s actually gonna help people.”

So says Senator Ron Wyden, the senior U.S. Senator from Oregon — a Democrat with a self-proclaimed “libertarian streak” and the guest on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. As one of the more tech-savvy members of Congress, he’s a proponent of new legislation that will regulate voting machine companies and data firms such as Cambridge Analytica, but also believes existing laws have given platforms like Twitter more power than they have deigned to use.

“I think what the Alex Jones case shows, we’re gonna really be looking at what the consequences are for just leaving common decency in the dust,” Wyden told Recode’s Kara Swisher. “... What I’m gonna be trying to do in my legislation is to really lay out what the consequences are when somebody who is a bad actor, somebody who really doesn’t meet the decency principles that reflect our values, if that bad actor blows by the bounds of common decency, I think you gotta have a way to make sure that stuff is taken down.”"

There should be ‘consequences’ for platforms that don’t remove people like Alex Jones, Senator Ron Wyden says -- Recode