Does Facebook have too much power?
The scale of internet platforms such as Google and Facebook is unprecedented in the tech world and, I would argue, unprecedented since the Dutch East India Company. They are ubiquitous in almost every country that has an economy. And when you are ubiquitous, the political imperative is to align with power.
And that is why in countries such as the Philippines Facebook has been used to marshal public opinion in support of death squads. In Cambodia, it is being used to suppress dissent. In Myanmar it was used to incite ethnic cleansing. That’s what happens in authoritarian regimes.
In democratic regimes, these companies are actually more powerful than the government. Because they are so ubiquitous, that they can use their users as a human shield politically, to prevent any kind of change. So what you see is the defiance of subpoenas in the UK and Canada. And pre-Trump, and even early into Trump’s reign, they defied Congress.
Facebook, in particular, has more monthly users than there are notional adherents to Christianity. Roughly twice as many as there are people in China. And when your numbers are that big, your ego can sometimes give you the illusion that you are a nation state.
In practice, in the US, how does this work?
Facebook’s approach can be explained by the way [Facebook’s chief operating officer] Sheryl Sandberg took to recruiting a government relations team. Google has people that lobby both parties and it spends more money than Facebook, but it tries to do so in a way that is discreet. Facebook hired rightwing operatives such as [ex-Bush aide and energy lobbyist] Joel Kaplan. Someone made the point that Kaplan was hired to lobby Republicans but in reality it appears he’s been more successful lobbying Facebook. Kaplan has got Facebook tightly aligned with the Trump administration. Kaplan even got involved in the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court nomination.
Is there a risk for Facebook in aligning itself closely with Trump?
The trick when you’re doing political lobbying is not to take up a position so extreme that if your side loses you can’t come back from it. I don’t know whether Facebook has gone too far to the right. Only time will tell. Zuckerberg has met privately with Trump on two occasions without any prior notice – the second time was only discovered because of leaks. Is he doing that with Biden? I don’t think so.
Did Facebook win the 2016 election for Trump?
The 2016 election was incredibly close because of a series of factors which would have been hard to predict. But in the end, if you look at voter suppression of suburban white women, black people, and young people who had voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries by the Trump campaign on Facebook and Instagram in the states which Trump had to win, then more than enough voters were discouraged from going to the polls to make the difference. Social media can do this by, for example, running ads which show long queues or disturbances at voting stations, or messaging creating apathy about the democratic process. It took nine things happening before that for that factor to matter at all, but it was really important. So Facebook had a lot to do with Trump getting elected. There were no rules then that said you couldn’t use social media to suppress votes.
Facebook approached it like engineers. They said: “Wow, these guys are willing to commit their whole budget. So they’re willing to let us run the experiment of whether we can get this to actually work. Wow, this is cool.”
It never occurred to them that doing it for one side and not the other might be an ethical problem. It never occurred to them that doing so might actually lead to consequences for the country that would be hard to recover from. Remember, this is a company that had the motto “move fast and break things”. But when you apply move fast and break things in politics, the things you’re breaking are the lives of everybody in the country.
The value system of internet platforms, but especially Facebook, is a threat to whatever remains of democracy in the US.
If Biden wins in 2020, do you think he’ll make any attempt to reform or regulate these platforms?
I wrote an open letter that was published in Wired. It was triggered by President Obama suggesting that Biden should work with Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman – two of the absolute architects of the current internet culture. And my basic message is, go ahead, take their money, work with them on the campaign, but you cannot work with them on technology policy. And you have to recognise that the thing that made these guys so successful and that makes them valuable to you in the campaign makes them singularly unqualified to help you out there.
I’ve had several people connected to the Biden campaign say my article is going like wildfire.
Having politics take place on social media has given the social media platforms enormous power. And so, when you look at hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories, if you take them out, the level of engagement on these platforms goes way, way down – and with it, their economic value. Hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theories, that is the lubricant for their business.
They would claim they’ve taken steps to reduce that type of content…
Every time there’s pressure on them to either eliminate a bad actor like Alex Jones, or to take down a piece of bad information like something on the pandemic or Trump’s “looting shooting” post, they take down the bare minimum.
When you take out a few things and leave everything else up, it creates the illusion that everything else is OK. These people have shown no willingness to self-regulate, no understanding of the responsibilities they have to society. It’s time for society to take matters into its own hands.
So how should social media be regulated?
There are four categories: safety, privacy, honesty and competition.
Safety has two elements. First, no tech product should be shipped until it demonstrates safety and freedom from bias; and if that fails, the penalties should be huge. Second, in the US, we have a safe harbour for internet platforms called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I would like to amend it so that any company that does not treat all content identically loses the protection of Section 230. So this goes after the algorithms that amplify content such as hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories disproportionately, giving political power to the most extreme voices.
It is a very small change. It doesn’t say you can’t do algorithmic amplification, but if you do it you are under threat of legal action. And there have to be real teeth. You have to give everybody the right to sue. They have to be able to sue for explicit financial rewards, even for things that don’t normally have a financial price. For instance you could put a price on revenge porn – which gets amplified like crazy.
The second category is privacy. There I would like to follow the Shoshana Zuboff model of treating private data as a human right, as opposed to an asset. That’s a big leap from where we are. So the starting point is to move to an opt-in model – GDPR and the California Computer Privacy Act, are both opt-out, so all the burden is on the consumer. I want to reverse the burden and place it on the people who use data, transfer it and so on.
Third, honesty. Google and Facebook have an oligopoly power over ad networks. The industry suspects that many of the ads they are paying for are never seen. If that’s true it means the revenues are overstated, which would be a securities law violation, which may give rise to a felony, which would have jail time associated with it. That would change incentives very rapidly.
Last, competition. The US economy is horribly concentrated but in this industry it is particularly damaging. So I want to revive the three core antitrust laws in the US, which have been allowed to become essentially moribund. I want to get back in the business of encouraging entrepreneurship, encouraging innovation, because these guys have they stopped all that. A Biden administration has the opportunity to address of all this.