Senators Threaten to Regulate Facebook Unless It Makes Fixes

Senators Chris Coons and Bob Corker warned that Congress would impose new regulations to rein in Facebook unless the company addresses concerns about privacy and the spread of misinformation, according to Bloomberg.

Speaking in a joint interview on the sidelines of a development forum in Wilmington, Delaware, the two senators said that Facebook probably wouldn’t like what Congress does, so it should come up with a solution first. “If they don’t, if they continue to act as if we couldn’t possibly deign to regulate them, they’ll get regulated and they’ll be unpleasantly surprised with how swiftly it may happen,“ said Coons. “I think they’ve got a lot of explaining to do.“

In the interview, Coons said he expected Congress to come up with privacy rules comparable to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.“I would prefer that the innovative private sector come forward first with a proposal for how they would handle data privacy and some of these very worrying technological developments and let us negotiate and work through it together,“ Coons said.