Big Tech and its super influential social media platforms had a rough four years after Donald Trump became president, finding themselves constantly under fire from corporate media and politicians and even employees, basically for “not having done enough” to stop that from happening.
The only real way to do that would have been to silence or remove Trump and his supporters from the networks, and in order to get back in the good graces of power centers, these corporations after 2016 started to introduce previously unseen levels of censorship and deplatforming. Now it would appear that they will now be rewarded for that, as Joe Biden prepares to take over.
Of course, Biden’s transition team includes dozens of Big Tech figures, current and former.
They come from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, AirBnB and LinkedIn, and according to the transition website, one of them is Facebook’s former attorney Jessica Hertz whose beat will be “ethics.” But these ties run much deeper than than the current US election cycle, as Hertz was Biden’s principal deputy counsel while he was the VP in the Obama administration.
Former Twitter public policy director Carlos Monje doesn’t yet have a role assigned to him in the transition team, but he joined it several months ago.
Other Big Tech employees who are now members of Biden’s team include Amazon’s current director of tax planning Tom Sullivan who is listed on the transition website as a volunteer.
Another figure who was involved with previous Democratic administrations and is now back is Nicole Wong, formerly of Twitter and Google, who now works for Albright Stonebridge Group, and in 2013 served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer.
The same is true of Ted Dean who is head of public policy at Dropbox, and in the past worked as deputy assistant secretary with the US Department of Commerce under Obama.
Uber’s chief security officer Matt Olsen, meanwhile, was general counsel of the National Security Agency, also under Obama.
Others on the Biden-Harris transitional team include AirBnB’s Divya Kumaraiah and Clare Gallagher, Nicole Isaac of LinkedIn, and a number of others.
