There are more candidates for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential race than in any other prior election. It is clear in the early stages of the campaign that breaking up tech giants like Facebook will be a huge issue that will be debated among the candidates. The first one of the candidates to bring it up was Senator Elizabeth Warren. She received a large amount of media coverage for her comments about breaking up large Silicon Valley tech companies like Apple and Facebook. There are many people who agree with her comments about these companies becoming too large and powerful. Facebook is considered by many people to be a monopoly at this point.
It is interesting that it is the Democrats who have turned on the tech companies that populate Silicon Valley. This is because the tech industry as a whole has always been notoriously liberal. These companies have donated literally millions of dollars to the campaigns of countless Democrats at local, state and national levels of government. However, it would appear that the constant privacy scandals that Facebook has endured over the past several years have turned politicians against the social media giant. It could also be that politicians sense which way the wind is blowing. The Democratic candidates realize that public sentiment is currently against Facebook. Therefore, these candidates are seizing upon calls to break up the company.
Elizabeth Warren is no longer the only Democratic candidate for president who is calling for Facebook to be broken up. She has now been joined by Senator Kamala Harris from California. She said recently that Facebook has become very successful without paying close enough attention to the privacy of their users. She also added that the personal data of Facebook users has been treated like a marketable commodity. Facebook has reaped massive profits by allowing other companies to harvest user data. Harris said that breaking up Facebook is definitely something that needs to be looked into.
Some of the other Democratic presidential candidates have stopped short of saying that Facebook and other large tech companies should be broken up. However, many of them have said that the increasing power of these companies needs to be dialed back. Some politicians like Senator Cory Booker have supported punishing the large tech companies for engaging in behavior that is considered to be anticompetitive. Joe Biden has not said anything on this issue as of yet.
