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fAcebook is struggling these days, so you would expect the company to be in trouble. For example, during a Senate hearing, Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy allowed it to Colin Stretch of Facebook.
Kennedy confronted Stretch, the company’s former general counsel, with a report that Facebook micro-targets emotionally vulnerable teens, asking, “Was that reporting wrong?” Stretch responded with a standard Facebook line: “That reporting was based on an internal document that was exaggerated.” It didn’t satisfy Kennedy. “Your power scares me sometimes,” he said. Another day, another PR black eye for Facebook.
But if you don’t recognize this particular exchange, it’s because it happened more than three years ago, before whistleblower du jour, Frances Haugen, even joined Facebook. And in the time since that hearing, the company’s stock has doubled.
Indeed, Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. Before this hearing, there were scandals, such as privacy violations that led to a Federal Trade Commission consent decision in 2012. There were scandals after this hearing, such as Facebook being exposed as facilitating genocide in Myanmar. In 2019, the US government fined Facebook $5 billion for violating its commitment to the government to stop misleading users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. In 2020, the House Antitrust Subcommittee revealed documents showing Mark Zuckerberg was explicitly predatory in his business methods, which were supplemented by the Federal Trade Commission complaint filed earlier this year. And yet we see almost no action of significance.
So forgive me, as a longtime critic of Facebook, for failing to see this latest round of bad press — revealing nothing we don’t already know — as not getting to the root of the problem.
That problem is simple. Lawlessness pays. We’ve known for years that Facebook is lawless and reckless. And yet, despite all the light and heat, Facebook is still a global monopoly on our information commons. One man is still in charge and making all major policy decisions, and he is worth $100 billion and is considered a major leader and philanthropist. In other words, when a bank robber robs a bank, blame the bank robber. If a bank robber robs 20 banks and announces what he’s going to steal from next, and does so repeatedly in broad daylight, and no one is stopping him, we have to blame the police. And that’s where we are with Facebook.
While Haugen has provided helpful documents showing that Facebook knows what we all know — that Instagram is bad for teenage girls and that Zuckerberg isn’t a model of virtue — it has boosted the call to “do something”. And there’s a feeding frenzy from media and political leaders praising the heroism of a wealthy Silicon Valley insider telling us what we already know. A Scottish legislator early Haugen point blank: “Is Facebook bad?”
But all this focus on Facebook and the personalities involved is missing the point. If we set up a policy system that offers a reward for destroying our social fabric near $100 billion and unlimited power, this is what we will get. The problem isn’t Facebook, it’s a policy regime that creates an incentive for monopolization, securities fraud and surveillance advertising.
The most important question is what policymakers are going to do about the problems that Facebook poses. There are two basic problems. First, Facebook has tremendous market power, and its antitrust laws have been weakened by courts and economists in recent decades. Despite all the scandals over Facebook, a judge recently dismissed the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against the company because, he said, the government had failed to prove that Facebook was a monopoly. The lawsuit has since been resubmitted, but even if it goes through, it will go to trial in 2023, with a recovery phase extending to 2025. That’s ridiculous. The standards for proving harm should be lower and the courts should act faster.
Second, Facebook and all social media and internet advertising agencies can use detailed records to target us with ads wherever we go online. That’s a conflict of interest because it promotes a business model where communication facilities try to hook us up so they can sell us more ads. Unlike a telephone network, which is not funded by advertising, social media companies choose incendiary content to promote. This creates both filter bubbles of conspiracy-theory communities and redirects ads from legitimate publishers, such as local newspapers, to ad monopolists such as Facebook. This policy failure also has policy roots: libertarian judges and policymakers have successfully fought for decades against rules prohibiting such conflicts of interest in business and ensured that rules regarding data or privacy were voluntarily or poorly enforced.
And this brings us to the reason we haven’t done anything about Facebook. To actually tackle the problem of dominant market power and conflicts of interest, we, the people, would have to empower our government to rule. We should pass laws that strengthen antitrust enforcement, we should prevent corporate conflicts of interest, such as a communications company vertically integrated into an advertising network, and we should restore the rule of law against the powerful when they commit crimes.
It is necessary, and much too late. And policymakers are moving in that direction. In New York, for example, state lawmakers are debating an abuse of power bill that would step up enforcement of antitrust laws. At the FTC, enforcers are considering using new regulatory tools to address unfair competition methods. In Ohio, the attorney general uses the public benefit law to tackle big technology. Hopefully, at some point, enforcers will even use criminal law and handcuff powerful lawbreakers.
Congress itself is taking action. Lawmakers are mulling over antitrust laws that would break up big technology, though in all likelihood the only law to pass is a law to ban self-preference that would have little impact on Facebook. The legislature is also considering changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that would allow major tech companies to avoid liability for their products.
Ultimately, any change to address Facebook will have far more impact than the social media giant, because Facebook is merely the driving force behind an economy full of concentrated corporate actors using similar tactics. We should stop the rampant bank robbery, not just from Mark Zuckerberg, but from everyone who does it. That would be a great thing to do, to restructure our economy so that predatory behavior is actually punished rather than rewarded.
So let’s go there. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another story about that nefarious bank robber unless it is recognized that Facebook’s problems are downstream from the failure of our democratic institutions to solve them.
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Sources 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/26/facebook-scandal-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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