Silicon Valley’s role in Russian meddling
Frustrated lawmakers “took tech company officials to task” last week, said Craig Timberg in The Washington Post. In three days of barbed Capitol Hill hearings, lawyers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter were scolded in “strikingly direct terms” for the companies’ failure to identify or defuse Russia’s campaign to manipulate American voters. Facebook admitted that as many as 150 million Americans may have seen posts created by Russian operatives during the election, while Google’s YouTube disclosed that more than 1,100 videos related to the Russian effort had been uploaded. Lawmakers implicitly threatened to “rein in” the tech companies’ operations if more isn’t done to combat misinformation. “I don’t think you get it,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), comparing Russia’s meddling with “cyber warfare.” It is “shocking” to learn the extent of the Russian manipulation effort, especially after the tech companies repeatedly underplayed the problem, said Steve Coll in The New Yorker. Yet this fits a pattern of tech companies, particularly Facebook, “evading accountability.” While Facebook’s general counsel was being grilled, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were “on a conference call about Facebook’s quarterly profits of nearly $5 billion.”
The revelations last week should “give pause to anyone who cares about democracy,” said the Financial Times in an editorial. Facebook and other social media firms can no longer claim they are “neutral platforms, with no role as arbiters of truth or social acceptability.” They are able to reach audiences of “previously unimaginable size,” so they have a responsibility to police content—which they already do by “striking out posts that promote terrorism and crimes such as child pornography.” But so far, they “have appeared incapable or unwilling to selfpolice” beyond that, said Renée DiResta and Tristan Harris in Politico.com. That’s why we need an independent regulator to ensure that people aren’t being fed fake news or targeted with divisive content. Users “have a right to know when they have been manipulated.”
“We should fight the bad ideas and the messengers, not the medium,” said Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg.com. Facebook and Twitter are platforms, and they aren’t responsible for the content that users post. All sorts of terrible conversations take place over the telephone, ranging from hateful speech to criminal plots. Would you hold the phone company responsible for what happens over its wires? Social media companies are just “a mirror, reflecting us,” said Emily Parker in The New York Times. And they’ve revealed us to be “painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing to spread lies.” That’s a hard reflection to accept. “So we blame the mirror.”