Once Cozy With Silicon Valley, Democrats Grow Wary of Tech Giants

Tech policy officials from the Obama administration and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as prominent Democrats in Congress, are demanding changes from companies they had long viewed as too important and nimble for regulations.  “Democrats and progressives still strongly feel that there are shared values with Silicon Valley, but there is also a real concern over the industry’s increasingly concentrated wealth and power,” said Daniel Sepulveda, an ambassador and deputy assistant secretary at the State Department for the Obama administration. Karen Kornbluh, who served as Obama’s ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that before the election, there was a view of “internet utopianism” in government. Officials looked to the internet to solve problems in education, income inequality and global democracy. They called on tech executives to help with those initiatives and hired from Google and other tech outfits to bring their expertise into the White House. “So if you were championing the best things about the internet, it was easy to be disappointed that it was hijacked to subvert the very things it could foster,” Kornbluh said. But she said few people in government were looking with a full view of how social media and other internet services posed national security, economic and other risks. “#DigitalDeceit: Exposing the Internet Technologies of Precision Propaganda” argues that the interests of internet giants in helping advertisers run persuasive campaigns are aligned with those of someone looking to spread misinformation.