Democrat senator Amy Klobuchar on regulating Big Tech: ‘Stop pretending they’re some little company’

Sen. Amy Klobuchar took aim at Big Tech on Sunday, saying that it’s time Congress stop kicking the can on passing legislation to crack down on large social media companies.

But the Minnesota Democrat said lawmakers’ focus should be on preventing misinformation and disinformation as Republicans say the real culprit is the censorship of conservative content, as has been exposed by the release of internal documents from Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover.

“They are a publisher. And let’s just start facing the facts and stop pretending they’re some little company in a garage. Maybe one day, they were. But now, they are mega companies. And this is starting to happen all over the world,” Ms. Klobuchar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

She blamed the lack of Congress’ ability to come together and pass new laws on social media companies on the money spent from the industry persuading lawmakers not to target them.

“It’s actually even more insidious,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “[The tech lobby] is so powerful that you literally can have a bill that got through the Judiciary Committee with strong bipartisan support, you can get promises from leaders that it’s going to be a major end-of-year bill and then within 24 hours, it’s gone. It’s vanished because of two companies, in this case Facebook and Google.”