MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Amy Klobuchar

Interview

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O`DONNELL: Joining us now, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Thank you very much for joining us, Senator.

KLOBUCHAR: Thanks, Lawrence.

O`DONNELL: I have to say, this situation is just crazy. This is an extremely dangerous product that can be a safe product just like air travel. Air travel is extremely dangerous if you just don`t do the maintenance.

KLOBUCHAR: Well, I love the way Mr. Horowitz described this as a company that just kept going day after day, how can we make more money, how can we get more people hooked, how can we expand the content? And pretty soon they realized, hey, the more angry content, the more people will read it and then we can target them with ads and make more money. It was basically that straightforward.

But as he described, unraveling it and putting some safeguards on it for the rest of us is not so easy. And I would start with this. We simply have done nothing in Washington. I have been crying for this, calling for it for years now.

[22:29:51]

We must have a federal privacy law and we are working on that in the Commerce Committee under Senator Cantwell`s leadership.

We have to get that done. So people -- when people are asked, do I want my data to be used? A lot of them say no. Apple knew that. They just asked, 75 percent of their customers decided they didn`t want to share their data.

Number two, more stuff on kids, expanding the child privacy rules that are already in place, the law.

Number three, doing something about the algorithms that was pointed out by Mr. Horowitz, making it more transparent what is happening, and then competition policy.

And finally, making them liable for things when there is hate speech and when there`s violence and misinformation in the middle of a public health crisis.

He is clearly -- Mark Zuckerberg himself said he was on pretty much a no- apology tour, I believe, a few weeks back. I don`t know if that`s where he still is, but the point is that I don`t think they`re going to get there on their own.

O`DONNELL: Well, they absolutely are not. I mean that`s what the "Wall Street Journal`s" reporting has proven here from inside the company is that Zuckerberg knows, he knows everything.

KLOBUCHAR: He does.

O`DONNELL: And he doesn`t care. He does not care.

KLOBUCHAR: No.

O`DONNELL: He`s not going to do anything to --

KLOBUCHAR: Exactly.

O`DONNELL: -- do anything to make this product safer for people to use.

KLOBUCHAR: And whether he intended to have it be unsafe from the beginning, it is really not as relevant to me anymore. What is relevant is that it isn`t safe and that they`re going to continue doing this until we start passing some laws.

You can`t have 20 percent of the economy be tech and then not having passed any privacy laws on the federal level, no changes to competition policy, which I`ve long been requesting, wrote a book about it, have a major bill I just put out, bipartisan bill on how to stop self-preferencing and some of the other crap that goes on when people are trying to gain a competitive edge.

I think people need to stop listening to the over 300 tech lobbyists that are crawling around these halls where I am right now and start listening to the moms and dads in their own state who will tell you that they are desperately trying to figure out how to protect their kids.

One way you do it with rules, the other way you do it is by allowing competitors in the marketplace and not letting Facebook buy everything so that you can have competitors that perhaps would have more safeguards for misinformation or protect kids more. That just isn`t happening right now.

O`DONNELL: Mark Zuckerberg said tonight that "The Wall Street Journal`s" reporting and Frances Haugen`s whistle blowing and supplying thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages of data and information, what he says about that is, "What we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively leak documents to paint a false picture of our company."

What is your reaction to that?

KLOBUCHAR: You know, I heard that tonight, and I thought, ok, first of all I didn`t even know this information was coming out. I was going on my own on this for years, trying to put in some rules of the road. I talked on your show about it, for political ads, trying to do something about all of the hate speech that was part of what led, and that`s what the documents showed today, on January 6th.

The fact that they weren`t doing anything, he claimed that they limited 96 percent of hate speech. His own researchers saying it was only 5 percent.

So what this is, is the truth is coming out. At some point the truth was going to come out. And then the question is what do you do about it. And that`s what I`m asking my colleagues. We`re going to have another hearing on other platforms tomorrow in the Commerce Committee, and we will move forward from there. But we have to get something done now, Lawrence.

O`DONNELL: Senator Amy Klobuchar, thank you very much for joining us now.

KLOBUCHAR: Thank you.

O`DONNELL: Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

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