Facebook is harming our society. Here’s a radical solution for reining it in.
Frances Haugen, who revealed herself Sunday as the Facebook whistleblower, could not have made things any clearer.
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” the former member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, who left the company this spring, told Scott Pelley of CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
This wasn’t just Haugen’s opinion as a digital-economy veteran, with a long stint at Google before she joined Facebook. She had the goods. The huge trove of documents that she took when she left the behemoth social network spells out its ugly incentive structure in case you had any remaining doubt: Outrage, hate and lies are what drive digital engagement, and therefore revenue.
The system is broken. And we all suffer from it.
But how to fix it? A problem that threatens the underpinnings of our civil society calls for a radical solution: a new federal agency focused on the digital economy.
The idea comes from none other than a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, Tom Wheeler, who maintains that neither his agency nor the Federal Trade Commission are nimble or tech-savvy enough to protect consumers in this volatile and evolving industry.
“You need an agency that doesn’t say ‘here are the rigid rules,’ when the rules become obsolete almost immediately,” Wheeler, who headed the FCC from 2013 to 2017, told me Monday.
Too much of the digital world operates according to Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto: “Move fast and break things.” That’s a perfect expression of what Wheeler called “consequence-free behavior.”
So if we really want to think about the public interest in the fast-paced digital world, it’ll be necessary to revise
“the cumbersome, top-down rule-making process that has been in place since the industrial era,” as Wheeler wrote in a Harvard’s Shorenstein Center paper, with Phil Verveer, the Justice Department lead counsel on a suit that resulted in the breakup of AT&T, and Gene Kimmelman, a prominent consumer-protection advocate.
Digital platforms like Facebook and Google have become “pseudo-governments that make the rules,” Wheeler told me. No surprise that they make the rules to benefit themselves.
The existing regulatory structure just doesn’t work, he argued in a Brookings Institution piece. The FCC and FTC are filled with dedicated professionals but are constrained. Their antitrust actions may grab headlines but can’t protect against more general consumer abuses — like those take-it-or-leave-it “terms and conditions” they force on their customers.
And it’s not as though Facebook hasn’t been punished for its offenses. In 2019, the FTC slapped the company with a record-breaking $5 billion fine for deceiving billions of users and failing to protect their privacy.