New bill will force Twitter, TikTok and other social media platforms to increase transparency by sharing internal data

A bipartisan radical of senators introduced a measure connected Wednesday aimed astatine expanding transparency for Twitter, Facebook and different societal media companies arsenic lawmakers statement whether to prohibition TikTok.

The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act is intended to marque the companies' interior information much accessible to the nationalist by requiring the submission of indispensable information to autarkic researchers. The measure is sponsored by Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., seat of the Judiciary Subcommittee connected Privacy, Technology, and the Law; Rob Portman, R-Ohio, ranking subordinate of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Bill Cassidy, R-La.

Under the proposal, societal media companies would beryllium compelled to supply internal, privacy-protected information to researchers who've been approved by the National Science Foundation, an autarkic agency. The measure protects researchers from ineligible liabilities associated with automatic information postulation if definite privateness safeguards are followed.

Some content, specified arsenic broad advertisement libraries, contented moderation statistics, viral contented information and a platform's ranking and proposal algorithms would beryllium made disposable to researchers oregon the nationalist connected an ongoing basis, according to the bill.

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the caller policy, and companies that neglect to comply hazard a imaginable nonaccomplishment of immunity nether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which mostly protects them against libel for contented posted by members.

In a statement, Coons said the measure volition code a "dangerous deficiency of transparency astir however these platforms interaction our children, families, society, oregon nationalist security" and assistance to reply questions astir threats to nationalist information and perchance harmful content.

Earlier this month, lawmakers floated a bill to prohibition the fashionable societal media level TikTok successful the U.S. aft years of speculation astir the Chinese government's power connected ByteDance, the China-based institution that owns TikTok.

On Tuesday, national instrumentality enforcement issued a nationalist information alert connected the emergence of "sexortion," the online extortion of minors for sexually explicit imagery.

"I person a fig of concerns astir Big Tech — from facilitating enactment trafficking to burying contented astir the origins of Covid-19 — and I privation to guarantee that immoderate effect by Congress is effectual successful addressing those concerns," Portman said successful a statement.

Coons besides pointed to Twitter, which was precocious taken implicit by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, arsenic a "cautionary tale" of however a societal media company's transparency argumentation tin alteration with small announcement and fewer safeguards.

"Twitter was the 1 level that was comparatively transparent and had made immoderate investments and efforts astir guardrails and accountability and immoderate transparency astir its metrics," Coons said, according to The Washington Post. "All of that has been blown up by the alteration successful ownership."