New York Times: OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts.

November 4, 2021 Media

One of the most unsettling revelations in the cache of internal documents leaked by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has been just how little we know about Facebook, and consequently how unprepared our political culture is to do anything about it, whatever it is.

That’s the first problem in fixing Facebook — there isn’t much agreement about what, exactly, the problem with Facebook is. The left says it’s Facebook’s amplification of hate, extremism and misinformation about, among other things, vaccines and the last presidential election. President Biden put it bluntly this summer: “They’re killing people.”

Inherent in these concerns is a broader worry — Facebook’s alarming power. The company is among the largest collectors of humanity’s most private information, one of the planet’s most-trafficked sources of news, and it seems to possess the ability, in some degree, to alter public discourse. Worse, essentially all of Facebook’s power is vested in Zuckerberg alone. This feels intolerable; as the philosopher Kanye West put it, “No one man should have all that power.”

So, what to do about all this? In the past few days I asked more than a dozen experts this question. Here are some of their top ideas, and what I think about them.

Under the tech-friendly Obama administration, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission allowed Facebook to swallow up quick-growing potential rivals. Splitting Facebook into three or more independent companies would undo that regulatory misstep and instantly reduce Zuckerberg’s power over global discourse.

It could also improve the tenor of social media, as the newly independent networks “would compete with each other by differentiating themselves as better and safer products,” said Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antimonopoly advocacy group.

Still, as Stoller notes, a breakup might be a necessary measure, but it’s hardly sufficient; competition notwithstanding, after a split we’d be left with three networks that retain Facebook’s mountainous data and its many corporate pathologies.