Former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos called for carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and others to deplatform One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax during a Sunday morning appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Discussing the ongoing political polarization in America in the wake of the November election and the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Stamos suggested that since people now “are able to seek out the information that makes them feel good,” an incentive exists for some outlets to “become more and more radical.”
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“One of the places you can see this is on the fact that you now have competitors to Fox News on their right, OANN and Newsmax, which are carried by all the major cable networks, who are trying now to outflank Fox on the right because the moment Fox [News] introduced any kind of realism into their reporting, immediately a bunch of people chose to put themselves into a sealed ecosystem,” Stamos said. “They can do that both on cable. They can do it online, and that becomes a huge challenge in figuring out how do you bring people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us back into the same consensual reality.”
Stamos went on to suggest that social media companies collaborate together “in the same way they worked on ISIS.”
“There was a collaboration between the tech companies and law enforcement to make it impossible for them to use the internet to recruit and radicalize mostly young Muslim men at the same around the world,” he said. “Now we’re talking about the domestic audience in the United States.”
Before calling for outright deplatforming, the former Facebook insider lamented “extremely radical” influencers on YouTube who have “a larger audience than daytime CNN.” (RELATED: ‘People Who Want The Lies … Go To A Different Channel’: Jake Tapper Defends CNN, Takes Veiled Shot At Fox News)
“It is up to the Facebooks and YouTubes in particular to think about whether or not they want to be effectively cable networks for disinformation,” he said. “And then we have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem that these companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such to be bringing them into tens of millions of homes. This is allowing people to seek out information if they really want to, but not pushing it into their faces I think is really where we’re going to have to go here.”