New By Uttarakhand Sandesh 2021-02-11

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says Social Media Services Like Facebook, Twitter Need Clear Laws on Free Speech

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said social-media services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube need clearer laws and rules to govern whether controversial accounts, like former US President Donald Trump's, have a place on their services, rather than being asked to make free-speech decisions themselves. “Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not long-term stable—we do need to be able to have a framework of lawsortant as our democracy in the long run is just no way that at least I, as a citizen, would advocate for.” and norms,” Nadella said in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television's Emily Chang. “Depending on any one individual CEO in any one of these companies to make calls that are going to really help us maintain something as sacred and as imp Microsoft doesn't currently run a consumer social media service, but it is among cloud-computing providers that have been pulled into the debate over the deplatforming of certain individual voices, social-media accounts and entire apps, especially following the violent pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol last month. Amazon's cloud unit pulled its hosting services from Parler, a social network that touts itself as anti-censorship and was popular among conservative and extremist figures. Apple and Alphabet's Google previously had removed Parler from their app stores. The three tech companies' actions essentially took the service offline. Trump's account, meantime, was banned from Twitter and remains suspended on Facebook.