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Comment by prionassembly | Hacker News Reader

Will the new American administration (I'm not an American and should have no bone on American politics, but this is how the world works) will significantly enable Twitbookgle to exert powers they did not under Trumpism?

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As someone who was paying attention to the old days of online censorship (2000-2010) when the RIAA/MPAA were the big baddies, yes, it's going to get worse. Biden unfortunately was/is the the MPAA's man in congress for many years.

https://www.cnet.com/news/joe-bidens-pro-riaa-pro-fbi-tech-v...

http://techrights.org/2020/11/09/biden-riaa-and-mpaa/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dem-vp-pick-bidens-tech-policy-...

What powers did they not exert during the Trump administration?

Trump repeatedly chastised them for their censorship policies and the threat of additional legislation was always over their head. Now that the politicians in power are the ones allied with the tech giants, there's little stopping them (the tech giants) from going full 1984.

That's exactly my question: are they going to acquire new powers that we didn't know existed?

If anything I feel its more likely that they will face additional scrutiny. My understanding is the Democrats want more anti-trust laws, and are more likely to break up the big tech companies. Not sure how that might affect Twitter, but Apple, Google (Alphabet), Facebook, and Amazon are probably going to face a lot of additional issues.

https://apnews.com/article/technology-50e69e921c6699a3edbd73...

This might have been political posturing. The Obama administration was very cozy with SV and there's significant influence from big tech on Biden's administration[1]. Only time will tell.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/21/big-techs-stealth-push-to-in...

What limits did Trump admin put on them? They bullied them into up weighting Conservative content and down weighting Liberal content but I doubt that changes.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jo...

Not clear why the downvotes. This is literally what happened despite Trump winning in 2016 before this re-adjustment of weightings. I am sure the slide deck will come out in FTC, congressional or court hearings in the next few years.

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