The former Vice President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, has hit out at the video game industry using his personal experience with meeting developers, of which he describes them as “little creeps,” “righteous,” and that they’re teaching people how to kill.
Back on December 16, Joe Biden took part in an interview with The New York Times in which the former Vice President discusses various policies and past situations with the journalists. Towards the end of the interview, he began to speak about his experience in Silicon Valley.
He says, “you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America.” The policy in question being the US § 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
He adds, “And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people,” An interviewer clarifies if he’s referencing video games, to which Biden responds, “Yeah, video games.”
In 2013, after the massacre at Newtown Connecticut, a Missouri representative had proposed a tax on violent video games. Around that time, Biden also began calling for violent video games to be taxed, and that there’s “no legal reason why they couldn’t.” He also pushed for significant research to be done to find a link between violent media and gun violence.
“I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking.” Biden continued to explain his time in Silicon Valley:
“And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, ‘We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.’ And fortunately I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.”
Biden added that “the point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree.” Biden then goes on to state that it’s a government responsibility when it comes to monitoring the tech industry:
“The fact is, in every other revolution that we’ve had technologically, it’s taken somewhere between six years and a generation for a government to come in and level the playing field again. All of a sudden, remember the Luddites smashing the machinery in the Midlands? That was their answer when the culture was changing. Same thing with television. Same thing before that with radio. Same thing, but this is gigantic. And it’s a responsibility of government to make sure it is not abused.”
You can read the entire transcript of the interview here if you’re interested in the other questions raised on different topics by The New York Times. Biden is currently a running candidate for the 2020 US presidential election, which is to take place on November 3, 2020.
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