Facebook: It started out as a fun place to keep tabs on your relatives and "poke" your friends. It has become a digital radicalization machine and a threat to democracy (yes, seriously).

The executives who run Facebook have willfully failed to learn the valuable - and obvious - lessons of the past. In particular, despite a 2016 election rife with misinformation spread on its platform, Facebook is refusing to take down political ads that are verifiably false. It's like their only takeaway from the whole debacle was that Russian propaganda is good for their bottom line.

Fortunately, Democrats are finally getting wise to the threat that an unregulated Facebook poses. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg was torn limb from limb by progressive champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - something you should really see.

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But while Zuckerberg certainly won't want to talk to AOC again anytime soon, there's one Democratic presidential candidate that Facebook is particularly afraid of: Elizabeth Warren.

Why? Because Sen. Warren is all in to break up Facebook and other giant tech corporations. Do you agree with her stance? Click here to answer the question: Should we regulate Big Tech?

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In March, Sen. Warren took to Medium to lay out an ambitious plan for regulating tech monopolies. While plenty of politicians are calling to rein in Big Tech's market dominance, none have done so as boldly and clearly as Sen. Warren, who proposes tackling the problem in two ways:

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1. Preventing new, competition-squelching mergers and nullifying existing ones, like Facebook's merger with Instagram. The resulting increase in competition would lead to more innovation and more opportunities for small businesses to reach consumers, and it would decrease the leverage tech companies have over publishers of news and other content.

2. Prohibiting tech companies from both running a marketplace and selling goods and services on that marketplace. This means Amazon would not be able to unfairly promote its AmazonBasics product line over a third-party competitor, and Google would not be able to promote its own reviews over Yelp's.

This second piece is really important. Here's why:

Warren's plan updates antiquated antitrust laws for the digital age by defining certain Big Tech companies as "platform utilities" - a designation that more clearly explains Big Tech's unique role in dominating markets. This isn't like the huge oil barons and steel magnates of the Gilded Age - it's potentially worse. By controlling the platforms on which billions of dollars of products are sold, and then by exclusively positioning themselves as the top sellers on those platforms, Big Tech is simultaneously creating a system and then rigging that system in their own favor.

Facebook and Amazon have thrived simply because they haven't been regulated. For years, lawmakers lavished praise on the tech billionaires of Seattle and Silicon Valley while turning a blind eye to Big Tech's misdeeds and growing power.

And now, Warren poses an existential threat to their monopolies. Luckily, more and more Democratic politicians are calling out the concentration of power among the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Here in Seattle, for example, the City Council tried to impose regulations to make big corporations pay their fair share. (Their response? Pumping $1.5 million into swaying local elections and then, thankfully, losing big.)

We're glad Democrats are realizing that, if they're serious about taking on the rich and powerful, they'll have to take on a subset of the rich and powerful that controls the flow of information in our democracy: the technology industry. Warren has applied 21st century thinking to the idea of regulating monopolies, and she's making Mark Zuckerberg tremble in his hoodie.

If you agree Big Tech should be regulated, will you please respond to the question below? That way, we can really show our elected representatives where we stand - and pressure them to take real, effective, forward-thinking action.

Should we regulate Big Tech?

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Skunk Survey: Which Democratic presidential nominee has the best economic message? Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Other. Vote before midnight!

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