Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) says social media companies “greatly contributed” to misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
During an interview with CNN, host Dana Bash played back comments made by President Joe Biden about social media platforms.
“They’re killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and they’re killing people,” Biden said on Friday.
Bash asked Klobuchar if Facebook should face the consequences and be broken up.
“Social media has greatly contributed to this misinformation. There’s no doubt,” Klobuchar replied during Sunday’s interview. “Look at the numbers from the Kaiser Foundation. Two-thirds of the people who have not gotten vaccinated say because they’ve gotten something off social media.”
She added, “Come on. So I really appreciate President Biden calling this out.”
Watch her comments below:
Here’s my interview with @DanaBashCNN this morning where I spoke about the importance of passing federal voting rights legislation and so much more. pic.twitter.com/iLdA24ifHh
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) July 18, 2021
The senator explained she believes “we also should look at changing the liability standards when it comes to vaccine misinformation.”
She continued, “Senator Warner and Hirono and I already introduced a bill that would focus on discriminatory content and the like.”
The three senators introduced a bill in February to limit a law that protects social media platforms from liability over content posted by users. It would make them more accountable when posts cause harm.
“When we have a public health crisis and people are dying every day, enough is enough. These are the richest companies in the world,” Klobuchar said.
She added, “There’s absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be able to monitor this better and take this crap off of their platforms that are basically telling people, ‘Oh, hey, there’s problems,’ when we know science proves there isn’t.”
Klobuchar also told Bash she is a “fan” of using anti-trust laws to increase competition.
“But it is also about the misinformation out there on the social media platforms and breaking them up,” the senator said.
She went on, “Part of this is that they gobbled up so many companies that you don’t even have the chance that other media platforms could do this on social media. So I am a fan of using anti-trust to look back and see if they should divest assets so we could get true competition against the dominant platforms.”
Her comments come just days after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned misinformation “poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”