Government must break up platforms

By cutting off Donald Trump the social media CEOs whom we have entrusted with governing the new digital public squares took only one source of contagion out of a world where a deadly epidemic continues to rage.

Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and Twitter are among the most cash- and talent-rich companies on the planet. They have all the tools at their disposal to isolate and quarantine racist and violence-inflaming content. They know how to fact-check or outright ban lying advertisements. They know how to permanently suspend accounts of people who abuse the system.

And yet these companies have abetted the spread of fascist right-wing propaganda, lies about mail-in voting and election fraud, misinformation that leads people to endanger themselves in the pandemic, and violent white supremacist organising.

The longtime defence has been that the platforms are marketplaces of ideas. But the underlying reason has become obvious: Incendiary content yields more followers for people who post on the platforms, and algorithms draw audiences to such content inan unvirtous cycle, while advertising revenue grows for content and users that generate more engagement.

For people to benefit from the upsides of social media while reducing the threat to public safety, two things must happen next: the government must break up the companies and regulate them to allow for competitive mission-driven platforms to emerge whose motives can be aligned with serving the public good. And a new kind of social media platform must be funded by public and philanthropic sources, in a financing model akin to that of public broadcasting.