Fortune: Breaking Up Facebook Is Quickly Becoming a 2020 Campaign Issue
The number of issues discussed in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary keeps expanding.
From taxing wealth to student loan cancellation and a Green New Deal, subjects that did not gain much traction in the 2016 primary have come to be policy flashpoints in the crowded field of 23 candidates.
One such issue has been the question of whether to break up Facebook.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren led the charge by releasing an ambitious plan on March 8 calling for the breakup of the social media giant, along with Amazon and Google. She called for WhatsApp and Instagram to be spun off from Facebook.
She has since been joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in calling for the breakup of Facebook. And other candidates in recent days have expressed skepticism about the tech giant, following Facebook co-founder and 2008 Obama campaign organizer Chris Hughes’ publication of an op-ed in theNew York Times on May 9 calling for the government to break up the social-media platform.
Sarah Miller, deputy director of the Open Markets Institute, a Washington anti-monopoly think-tank, said that the speed at which Facebook has become a campaign issue has been remarkable.
“There has been a consensus built on this incredibly fast, faster than I would have imagined, given how popular Facebook was two or three years ago in Washington,” she told Fortune. She added that economic concentration and antitrust began to gain attention at the same time as Facebook experienced multiple scandals, which outraged “a range of different groups across the ideological spectrum.”