Washington, D.C. – On Thursday, July 11th, 2019 Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) joined Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria to discuss her latest work on privacy and Big Tech, including her letter to Snapchat urging them to protect children from child predators. She also discussed the ongoing crisis at the southern border and the need to pass the USMCA.
On Snapchat and Big Tech: “The Snapchat letter that I sent this week deals with the way pornography is made public on their site. The ratings are wrong on these apps, Parents need to be aware.”
“You need to give parents the tools to block this. This becomes a child predator’s dream for contacting these children. There are several cases where pedophiles have used Snapchat to contact and coerce these children.”
“Chris Hughes, who is the cofounder of Facebook, was in my office and we had a very productive discussion about how you deal with privacy and giving consumers the tool box to protect, as I term it, their Virtual You, themselves online.”
“You look at how the social media giants are prioritizing their content over content that should be readily available online. I’m going to have a meeting later today with the CEO of Yelp concerning this issue. Google prioritizes their [own] content. That determines what people see.”
“What I would like to see out of Big Tech is some responsibility and accountability.”
“The BROWSER Act is legislation that I introduced in the House. I have reintroduced that in the Senate and we are working to move that forward to get those guardrails in place.”
On Today’s Trip to Southern Border with Vice President Pence
“[The Border Patrol is] in desperate need of some help. My hope is our Democrat colleagues will being to work with us to give our Border Patrol the three things they need, they have been saying this for 20 years: give them a barrier, give them appropriate technology, give them more officers, agents and judges to deal with this issue.”
On USMCA and Trade with China
“The votes are there. If Pelosi were to put it on the floor it would pass. You’re looking at people who say, ‘Do we want to give Donald Trump a victory?’ Give the American people a victory!”
“We are going to continue to encourage holding that line against Huawei. China will steal our intellectual property. They will embed chips and build Huawei as a spy network in equipment and consumer products. We need to make certain we deal with that issue and not give them an inch.”
Related
Senator Blackburn wrote a letter to Snapchat on Monday urging CEO of Snap, Evan Spiegel, to take action to protect children from sexual predators and being exposed to explicit content while using Snapchat.
In April, Senator Blackburn introduced the BROWSER Act, requiring communications and technology companies to provide users with clear and conspicuous notice of their privacy policies and the ability to opt-in to the collection of sensitive information and to opt-out of the collection of non-sensitive information.
