Senator Mark Warner Says Social Media's 'Wild, Wild West' is Ending

Since the 2016 election, Senator Mark Warner has been Silicon Valley's most active and vocal watchdog on Capitol Hill. Warner, a Virginia Democrat, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence and a former telecommunications venture capitalist, published a white paper last year proposing a variety of legislative curbs on the tech industry. Those suggestions included putting the onus on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to identify bots and foreign election interference. Warner also has bipartisan co-sponsors for a variety of legislation aimed at curbing tech, including the so-called Honest Ads Act, which would require Facebook, Google and other platforms to be transparent about who is paying for political ads.

He is clearly onto something. The end of 2019 is shaping up to be a watershed period for the issue of how much the U.S. should regulate Silicon Valley. Seven states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, have already announced an antitrust investigation of Facebook; most of the states' attorneys general are probing Google over anti-competitive behavior. Additionally, the House Judiciary Committee just demanded Amazon, Google and Facebook hand over the personal emails of those companies' executives, hunting for evidence of anti-competitive schemes.

Warner, in a recent wide-ranging interview with Newsweek, explains why the era of unregulated Big Tech may be coming to an end. Here are some edited excerpts:

Warner: Our system is not secure in 2020. I would argue there are a variety of solutions that would get 80 votes on the floor of the Senate if we were allowed to vote.