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At the end of the Trump era, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, the seat of American democracy. Experts largely agree that the flourishing of misinformation online played a major part behind this riot. Certainly, social media has connected families across oceans, allowed political movements to blossom and reduced friction in many parts of our lives. However, it has also led to the rise of industrial-scale misinformation and hate speech, left many of us depressed or addicted, and thrust several corporations into unprecedented roles as the arbiters of our new online public square. Our relationships, the way we’re governed and the fates of businesses large and small all hinge on algorithms understood by few and accountable to even fewer. This was made clear to many Americans in the days after the Capitol riot, when Mr. Trump was suspended from Twitter, Facebook and eventually YouTube for his role in inciting the violence. Some denounced the moves as censorship; others wondered why it had taken so long. One thing most agreed on: Silicon Valley CEOs should not be the ones making such momentous decisions. Under President Joe Biden, tech reform will take on a new, almost existential urgency for American democracy. With the new Congress, his Administration can set the terms to regulate an industry that has produced the most powerful corporations on earth while escaping almost all oversight. Furthermore, the global tide of public opinion is turning against the tech companies. Activists have been sounding the alarm bell for years, particularly after 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, when hate speech shared by extremists on Facebook fanned the flames of ethnic cleansing. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 brought home to people that personal data they had given up so freely to Facebook could be used against them. The consequences of those so-called online harms appear in the offine world, in ISIS recruitment, white-supremacist terror, vaccine skepticism and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories like QAnon. The unaccountable power of the tech platforms lies not just in the algorithms that dictate what posts we see, but also in how that translates to profits. The wealth of the BigTech companies has come from extracting data about our behaviors and using the insights from those data to manipulate us in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with democratic values. Our emotions and behavior can now be intentionally, and secretively, manipulated by the platforms: in 2014, Facebook revealed it had conducted a study that found it could successfully make people more happy, or sad, by weighting posts differently in the News Feed. That same business model has produced personal news feeds that let anyone choose their own reality, and a shared delusion that propelled thousands of Americans toward the U.S. Capitol gates. Across the Atlantic, in December 2020, the E.U. and U.K. each proposed sweeping new laws that would force tech companies to make their algorithms more transparent and, eventually, accountable to democratically elected lawmakers. A key part of the E.U.’s proposal is that large tech companies could be fined up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they don’t open up their algorithms to public scrutiny and act swiftly to counter societal harms stemming from their business models.