19 Days to go: Big Tech and Our Democracy
With just nineteen days until the primary, I am using each day to discuss an issue I have highlighted on the campaign trail. For Day 19, I am highlighting the need to hold Big Tech accountable, get dark money out of politics, and restore our democracy.
Our democracy is battered and bruised, and it didn’t happen overnight. As much damage as Donald Trump has done, he hasn’t done it alone. The President and his cronies have exploited weaknesses in our democracy that were caused by massive corporate spending and the rise of unprecedented monopoly power, particularly in the tech industry. Too many people in Washington have either looked the other way or profited from it themselves.
Members of Congress trade stock on information the rest of us don’t have access to. Dark money is flooding our elections. A handful of tech companies are overpowering small businesses and monopolizing entire industries. And a near-total lack of privacy protections is leaving your personal data up for sale by big business and politicians alike.
These problems are all connected, and together, they’ve left everyday people with less and less say over the decisions that shape our lives.
So here is where I stand:
I will support legislation to ban stock trading by all elected and appointed officials in Congress, the Executive Branch, and in our federal courts. Serving in government means serving the people you represent, not yourself. The fact that we even have to debate this (and that it hasn’t passed yet despite overwhelming public support) tells you something about how far we’ve drifted.
I will enforce anti-monopoly laws against social media and Big Tech companies that use their vast market share to gobble up competitors and degrade their users’ experience (look up “enshittification”).
I will support term limits for members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Courtto prevent political stagnation and ensure that Congress is filled with leaders who are striving to make life better for people, not cling to power and grow their bank account.
I will impose meaningful privacy protections for users, so that Big Tech and social media companies can’t gobble up valuable data and use it to feed us endless streams of content designed to make us miserable and keep us scrolling.
But none of this happens if the people making the decisions are bankrolled by the very same companies they’re supposed to regulate, which is why we’re running this campaign the old fashioned way, from the grassroots.
We’re doing the hard work on the ground of making phone calls, knocking on doors, and having real conversations with voters to build the kind of grassroots support that corporate checks could never buy.
Thank you for supporting and spreading the word to vote Sept. 8th!
