Is it time for ‘Big Tech’ to lose shield?
WASHINGTON » Break up Big Tech? How about shrinking the tech companies’ shield against liability in cases where the content they push to users causes harm? Or creating a new regulator to strictly oversee the industry?
Those ideas have captured official attention in the U.S., Europe, U.K. and Australia as controversy has enveloped Facebook, which on Thursday renamed itself Meta, Google, Amazon and other giants. Revelations of deepseated problems surfaced by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, buttressed by a trove of internal company documents, have lent momentum to legislative and regulatory efforts.
But while regulators are still considering major moves such as breaking up some companies or limiting their acquisitions, the most realistic changes may be more tangible and less grandly ambitious. And also the kind of thing people might actually soon see popping up in their social feeds.
So lawmakers are getting creative as they introduce a slew of bills intended to take Big Tech down a peg. One bill proposes an “eraser button” that would let parents instantly delete all personal information collected from their children or teens. Another proposal bans specific features for kids under 16, such as video auto-play, push alerts, “like” buttons and follower counts. Also being floated is a prohibition against collecting personal data from anyone aged 13 to 15 without their consent. And a new digital “bill of rights” for minors that would similarly limit gathering of personal data from teens.
For online users of all ages, personal data is paramount. It’s at the heart of the social platforms’ lucrative business model: harvesting data from their users and using it to sell personalized ads intended to pinpoint specific consumer groups. Data is the financial lifeblood for a social network giant valued at $1 trillion like Facebook. Er, Meta. Advertising sales drive nearly all its revenue, which reached about $86 billion last year.
That means the proposed legislation targeting personal data collected from young people could hit the bottom line of the social media companies. On Tuesday, executives of YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat offered endorsements in principle during a congressional hearing on child safety, but wouldn’t commit to support already proposed legislation. Instead, they offered boilerplate Washington lobbyist-speak, saying they look forward to working with Congress on the matter. Translation: They want to influence the proposals.
Sens. Edward Markey, DMass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., proposed the two bills that address protection of kids online. They say they’re hearing more and more stories of teens overdosing on opioids obtained online or who died by suicide when their depression or selfhatred was magnified by social media
Among all of Haugen’s numerous condemnations of Facebook, her disclosure of internal company research showing that use of the Instagram photo-sharing app appeared to harm some teens appears to have resonated most with the public.
When it comes to kids, Republican and Democratic lawmakers — hopelessly divided over perceived political bias and hate speech in social media — are in solid agreement that something m.ust be done, and quickly. “One thing that unites Democrats and Republicans is ‘Won’t someone please think of the children,’” said Gautam Hans, a technology lawyer and free-speech expert and professor at Vanderbilt University. “It’s very sellable on a bipartisan basis.”
In the U.K., efforts toward tougher rules to protect social media users, especially younger ones, are farther along. Members of the U.K. Parliament asked Haugen for guidance on how to improve the British online safety legislation. She appeared in London before a parliamentary committee on Monday, warning members that time is running out to regulate social media companies that use artificial intelligence to push “engaging” content to users.
European Union privacy and competition regulators have been far more aggressive than their U.S. counterparts in bridling the tech giants. They have levied multibillion-dollar fines on some of the companies and adopted sweeping new rules in recent years. The U.K. established a new regulator for Facebook and Google this spring.
U.S. regulators only kicked into gear in 2019, when the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion, and YouTube $170 million in separate cases for alleged privacy violations. Late last year, the U.S. Justice Department and a number of states filed landmark antitrust suits against Google over market dominance in online search. The FTC and several states brought a parallel antitrust action against Facebook accusing it of abusing its market power to crush smaller competitors.
Beyond the child protection measures, U.S. legislators from both parties have floated a vast number of proposals designed to crack down on social media; target anti-competitive practices by Big Tech companies, possibly ordering breakups; and to get at the algorithms the tech platforms deploy to determine what shows up on users’ feeds.