Who Will Rein in Facebook? Challengers Are Lining Up
Who Will Rein in Facebook? Challengers Are Lining Up
Pressure is building, at home and abroad, as powerful
outsiders refuse to wait for Facebook to solve its own problems
By Christopher Mims Oct. 29, 2017 8:00 a.m. ET
We’re treated to fresh reports nearly every day about how
Facebook Inc.’s FB 4.25% efforts to keep bad actors from abusing its platform
fall short. The latest include U.K. legislators’ inquiry into whether Russians
used Facebook to influence recent British elections, and reports that
atrocities in Myanmar may be incited in part by fake news on Facebook.
Even before this wave, Facebook’s role in the spread of
divisive messages and outright falsehoods had inspired soul-searching at the
company, and a newfound humility at the top. In a string of blog posts, Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg promised to do more, including hiring 1,000
additional people to review political ads purchased on Facebook. Meanwhile,
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was recently dispatched to
Washington, D.C., on a charm offensive.
Yet many outside Facebook refuse to wait for the company
to solve these problems—and others yet to be uncovered—on its own. Pressure is
mounting, at home and abroad, from legislators, regulators and activists, all
looking for various ways to nudge and, in some cases, shove Facebook to
acknowledge and act on its responsibility as the most powerful distributor of
news and information on Earth.
While Twitter , Google’s YouTube unit and many other
social-media platforms face similar problems, they don’t all command the same
audience as Facebook. But what happens to Facebook will likely apply to them
all.
Compared with mature industries, the internet
giants—Facebook, Google, Twitter—are relatively unregulated by federal and
state law. “That’s what I think Facebook is most nervous about,” says Ryan
Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law who researches
Facebook’s legal and moral responsibilities—that “the sleeping giant wakes up
and realizes just how unregulated they are.”
That “sleeping giant” includes legislators of every kind
in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. While the current Congress is loath to mint
new regulations, that hasn’t stopped Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.), Amy
Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Mark Warner (D., Va.) from proposing the Honest Ads
Act, which would force internet companies to tell users who funded political
ads. Most forms of mass media are required to do this, but the Federal Election
Commission exempted Facebook and other internet sites in 2006, when online political
discourse was still nascent.
The new bill is an obvious way to bring the tech giants
in line with other media, with whom they clearly now compete, says Yochai
Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the Berkman Klein
Center for Internet and Society.
What it won’t solve is the even larger problem of Russia
creating content on Facebook that’s compelling, aka enraging, enough to go
viral without paid promotion. Researchers found that of the 470 sites created
by Russia, the six which Facebook has disclosed were shared a total of 340
million times—suggesting a total reach for all Russian content of billions of
shares.
Twitter recently announced all its ads would provide a
trace: who paid for them, and how they were targeted at users. Facebook will
also roll out tools for increased transparency of political ads and says they
should be functional before the 2018 midterm elections.
At the state level, Facebook is already fighting a battle
with regulators who would like to prevent the company from identifying our
faces without our express permission. State regulators could succeed at holding
Facebook accountable in ways Congress is unwilling to. Another possibility is
that America’s increasingly active state attorneys general could go after the
company.
Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who’s
contemplating a run for Illinois attorney general and has expertise in
Facebook’s potential liability in the Russian influence operations, says it’s
entirely plausible that state AGs will pursue the company’s records while
trying to determine Facebook’s culpability.
“I would be surprised if individual Facebook employees are
criminally liable for anything that happened, but I think a strong argument can
be made that if foreign powers advertise on Facebook, there should be
disclosure of the source,” Mr. Mariotti says. “None of those ads on Facebook
would have been very effective if they said ‘paid for by Russia.’ ”
Last but not least, there’s the impending threat of the
European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Going into force in May
2018, it opens a Pandora’s box of potential liabilities for all tech companies
around how they handle and exploit individuals’ data, guard against breaches
and transfer information across national borders.
For Facebook, it will mean new rules about disclosing
what it knows about its users. It will also mean sharp limits on what Facebook
can do with that data. For everything Facebook wants to do with a user’s data,
it will have to ask explicit permission, and it can’t re-use the data for new
purposes in the future.
The European regulations, which go into force in May
2018, could force U.S. tech companies to change a lot about how they operate
everywhere, unless they build separate systems for Europe. From left, European
Commissioners Andrus Ansip, Vera Jourová, Julian King and Mariya Gabriel, at a
Sept. 28 news conference in Brussels about illegal online content.
The regulation is so sweeping, it could force all U.S.
tech companies to change how they operate everywhere, unless they build
separate systems just for Europe, says David Carroll, an advocate for increased
regulation of Facebook and an associate professor of media design at the New
School’s Parsons School of Design.
In addition, EU citizens living in the U.S., and tourists
from Europe traveling here, could have standing to sue U.S. tech companies.
Dr. Benkler at Harvard hopes Facebook will feel enough
heat that it starts offering details of its inner workings. He’d like the
company to share data (in a careful, anonymized way) about how information
spreads on the network and how advertising is targeted. Independent researchers
could then identify the extent of malicious or harmful activity on the site.
“Maybe it turns out that fake news isn’t a real concern,
but at the moment there is no way for us to know,” Dr. Benkler says. “You need
an independent understanding of whether the garden has occasional weeds, or
whether the garden is overrun.”
Broad, sweeping changes are likely coming to America’s
tech giants. “All industries eventually get regulated,” Mr. Carroll says. But
that assumes regulators can outlast the tech giants, and not the other way
around.
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