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Of the federal government The campaign to reform Internet platforms has increased tremendously this week. Surgeon General cited misinformation as a public health threat. The White House press secretary has asked Facebook to remove 12 accounts that may be responsible for 65 percent of Covid’s misinformation on the site. Referring to Facebook, President Joe Biden said, “People are dying,” to go back a day later. He then appointed Jonathan Kanter, the architect of the EU’s anti-competition case, to head the Justice Department’s Anti-Competition Division. The table can finally be set for the necessary reform.
Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter have become basic communication platforms in our society, but collectively they are undermining public health, democracy, privacy and competition, with disastrous consequences. Most Americans understand this, but they don’t want to be bothered to lose what they like about Internet platforms. And they are struggling to understand the scope of the problem. The platforms have successfully polluted the waters, using their enormous wealth to select large parts of academia, think tanks and NGOs, and various politicians.
It’s easy to see why platforms fight so much for reform. Hidden misinformation, the overthrow of democracy, invasions of privacy, and anti-competitive behavior are not mistakes. These are examples of business models for Internet platforms that work in a designed way. The problem is that platforms like Google and Facebook are too big to be safe.
On the current scale, with twice as many active users as people in China, platforms like Google and Facebook are a systemic threat similar to climate change or a pandemic. Fixing them would be a challenge in the best of situations. But today, the courts are delaying economic power and Congress remains paralyzed, leaving the administration with our best hopes. Forty years of deregulation and reduced funding have left our regulatory infrastructure with few tools and few muscle tones. Fortunately, Tim Wu has appointed FTC former adviser to the National Economic Council, antitrust student Lina Khan as FTC chairman, FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra will head the Office of Consumer Finance Protection, Gary Gensler is the former chairman of the SEC’s future commodities trade committee, and Kanter because they understand the issues and take advantage of the limited tools at their disposal. The rewards for obtaining this right will be enormous.
The first challenge for the president and his team is to properly raise the issue. The tendency that politicians have had so far has been to see not only the systemic damage to Internet platforms as a set of issues of chance. With limited tools and time, the administration needs to look for high-leverage options.
Internet platforms are media companies, dependent on consumer attention, but they have great advantages traditional media. They have an unprecedented scale and impact. They are surveillance engines that collect data about users. This is complemented by the acquisition of location data on mobile phones; health data for prescriptions, medical tests, and applications; web browsing history and the like. With all of this, the platforms are creating data voodoo dolls that can predict user behavior that can be sold to advertisers, and make manipulative recommendation engines power predictions. Platforms can use this power to make users happier, healthier, or more successful, but instead use the data to exploit each user’s emotional triggers because it is easier and generates more revenue and benefits.
The last five years have shown that Internet platforms cannot be persuaded to reform themselves. They do not believe they are responsible for the damage caused by their products. They believe that these damages are a reasonable cost to succeed. That’s why Facebook did nothing significant after learning that it was used to intervene in Brexit and the 2016 presidential election. Why the company rose up after the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya of Myanmar and the direct attack on Christchurch. Why he dismissed the warnings used by the users to organize and carry out the uprising and the uprising against the radicalization of QAnon. And why they point out that Mark Zuckerberg and his team are not responsible for spreading Covid misinformation. Since 2016, politicians, civil society groups and activists like me have been trying to convince Facebook to change its good business practice for the public and executives. they have consistently chosen the country.
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