Elizabeth Warren, a top Democratic presidential candidate, has made breaking up tech giants core to her bid. Despite the tech industry’s constant deflection that their platforms are apolitical, progressives have grown increasingly unsatisfied at each new revelation of election interference, each new data leak, and each new report of extremist views propagating on these sites. Democrats, once the party of Silicon Valley’s modern progressivism, now seem just plain exhausted by its excesses. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”īut, as the polling shows, it is Democrats’ about-face on tech that has led the charge. “Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” the White House said on the tool’s website. Conservatives have harangued tech executives on Capitol Hill over these questions, which they flatly deny.Īnd Trump has given oxygen to these claims of anti-conservative bias this month, for instance, the White House launched a new tool for his supporters to report supposed censorship by social media companies. While conservatives typically celebrate big business, Republicans’ critiques of Silicon Valley giants center on accusations of political bias at Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Google, Amazon, and Apple also saw their favorability ratings drop in that time period, though not as sharply. One of the few companies that saw more reputational damage? Facebook, which fell 43 slots on the 100-company list to be about as popular - or unpopular, depending on how you look at it - as other scandal-plagued companies like Wells Fargo and the Trump Organization.Īnd when you dive into other survey research, you see that critiques of Google and Facebook are surprisingly bipartisan.įacebook’s favorability plunged from late 2017 to early 2018, surveys show - a decline driven largely by Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents deciding that they no longer felt positively about the social media giant. Google’s reputation fell 13 spots in Harris’ most recent poll issued in 2019, one of most precipitous declines in the survey. Take the Harris Poll, which surveys Americans on the corporate reputations of various companies. Compared to those scandals, the precipitating event for Silicon Valley’s imminent regulatory reckoning is less of a sudden discovery and more of a slowly building shift in Americans’ political beliefs. And it was only after the Watergate scandal that Washington created the Federal Election Commission to more closely govern campaign finance law. It took Wall Street’s subprime mortgage crisis to incite Congress to pass the Dodd-Frank legislation that tried to reform how our country’s financial system worked. Part of the answer seems to be that beating up on Silicon Valley is suddenly good politics. That’s why recent reports that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are divvying up responsibilities for possible action against the big four - and that legislators had begun a turn-over-every-stone investigation of companies like Facebook and Google - seemed at once both abrupt and a long time coming. Net income jumped about 50%, to $7.8 billion.The cascade of political probes targeting the four biggest companies in tech feels like it happened suddenly.īut Washington’s surge in scrutiny toward Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple in the past week is a natural culmination of a relationship between tech and society that’s soured over the past two years. Amazon sales climbed 27% to $113.1 billion - the third straight quarter its revenue topped $100 billion - but that was was shy of Wall Street forecasts. Companies also must allow users to download a copy of their data and delete any individual’s data on request.Īmazon’s disclosure of the fine comes a day after the company posted mixed Q2 earnings results. The GDPR, which went into effect May 2018, mandates a company disclose what data it collects from users and what it does with that data. That case could result in Amazon being fined up to 10% of its annual global revenue. Separately, last fall the European Commission filed antitrust charges against Amazon over alleged misuse of data to use non-public information to favor Amazon’s own retail business over third-party partner merchants. “We believe the CNPD’s decision to be without merit and intend to defend ourselves vigorously in this matter,” the company said in the filing.Īmazon’s EU headquarters are in Luxembourg, and thus its operations on the continent are subject to oversight by the country’s CNPD regulatory body.Įven if the fine against Amazon is upheld, it’s virtually pocket change for the international ecommerce giant: Amazon held $89.9 billion in cash and equivalents as of the end of June 2021.
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