Platforms

I strongly oppose the idea of breaking up Facebook. I don’t believe Facebook is a monopoly. The way to keep social media truly competitive is to reinstate net neutrality. That would even the playing field and allow startups to compete on equal footing with giants like Facebook and Google. If internet service providers start charging for special privileges such as internet “fast lanes,” deep-pocketed companies would be able to squeeze out smaller competitors that can’t afford such costs.

For all the promise of digital technologies to promote religious freedom, there are also very real downsides. When it comes to harnessing digital tools to punish religious minorities, the biggest offender is the world’s most populous country: China. China employs significantly more people to violate the rights of their citizens than the United States employs to militarily defend rights like free expression and freedom of assembly. 

The House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee grilled executives from Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google in a hearing as part of their wide-ranging investigation into big tech companies and the threats they may pose to competition.

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reintroduced the Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act, a bill to require disclosure of information concerning online social media bots. The Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to enforce transparency requirements on social media companies regarding the use of social media bots that replicate human activity online.

In this anti-big tech moment, the slogan “break them up” is simple, catchy and has been adopted by some politicians and other observers to capture the emotion of the era. Unfortunately, “breaking up” large tech platforms is often not a good solution to the economic harms created by large firms in this sector. Washington cannot just break up big tech, or any company, solely because it is large or has a high market share.

We should view user data as a public resource, akin to the broadcast spectrum. The spectrum broadcasters use is “owned by the people.” It is governed so as to assure that the select few who have the privilege to access the spectrum serve the public interest. User data, in its aggregate form, can — and should — be treated similarly, as a public resource. Just as broadcasters built their businesses on the collectively owned spectrum, social media platforms built their businesses on our data, data that are best thought of as being collectively owned.

President Donald Trump is a prolific Twitter user, using the social media site to promote his policies and criticize his opponents. But determining just how many Americans follow President Trump on the platform is more challenging than it may sound: Twitter, after all, is an international platform used by institutional accounts and bots as well as living, breathing people in the US. A new Pew Research Center analysis estimates that around one-in-five adult Twitter users in the US (19%) follow Trump’s personal account on the platform, @realDonaldTrump.

President Donald Trump’s “social media summit” probably marks the beginning, not the end, of Silicon Valley’s political headaches, opening the door for the White House and its conservative allies to intensify their attacks on Facebook, Google and Twitter over allegations that they exhibit political bias. President Trump coupled his complaints about the tech industry with a promise to summon top tech executives to Washington in the coming weeks and a threat to unveil new regulations targeting the way social media sites moderate content.

Beyond the circus-like atmosphere of the White House social media summit, the conference had serious implications for Silicon Valley. It highlighted how President Donald Trump's attacks on Big Tech are creating more political jeopardy for the tech companies in Washington:

President Donald Trump assailed Facebook, Google and Twitter for exhibiting “terrible bias” and silencing his supporters at a White House “social media summit” that critics chastised for giving a prominent stage to some of the internet’s most controversial, incendiary voices. For President Trump, the conference represented his highest profile broadside yet against Silicon Valley after months of accusations that tech giants censor conservative users and websites.