The Government Is Waging War On Social Media

Inaccurate information on social media is altering our judgement and sensibilities, amplifying division, and fueling culture wars around identity, race, class, similar to the polarizing content we’ve seen on cable news and talk radio. For a long time, our reactions have been measured and these algorithms just keep getting better at stealing our attention, especially the folks in rich countries who touch their phones about a thousand times a day.

Last week, lawyers from Google, Facebook and Twitter met with a Senate judiciary subcommittee to testify about social media’s role in politics, specifically the Russian online influence campaign that happened during the 2016 US election. Political scientists used to say the best thing about liberal democracy is the freedom to live life the way you want. But that seems to be somewhat problematic when good information becomes hard to find. Nowadays everyone seems to be wondering if people with different beliefs can live together peacefully.

It’s more clear now that the rise of fake news and social media is capable of ripping the country apart inside out. We see more coercion, bigotry, lies, and at some point, experts used to say social media could catapult us into political and social enlightenment. Social media was supposed to improve communication, help us filter corruption and misinformation, but we might be moving in the wrong direction.

146 million Americans saw misinformation on Facebook created by the Russians. YouTube had 1,108 Russian-linked videos with about 43 hours of content, and Twitter had more than 36,000 Russian bots who tweeted 1.4 million times during the election. Some of the ads were about Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, illegal immigration and Islam.

One fake Facebook group called “Black Matters” received about a quarter million “likes” and some of the other groups were related to the 2nd Amendment, President Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Texas Border.

During the testimony, Senator Al Franken said Facebook should’ve noticed the Russian online influence campaign when ads were bought with rubles, a Russian currency. Senator John Kennedy shared some words about Facebook collecting so much data from users, but hardly enough information about the “5 million advertisers that change every year, every month, probably every second.”

Kennedy grilled Google about their business model. Google chose not identify as a newspaper, (probably because technology platforms are not liable to the legal responsibilities of journalists). Later on, Senator Lindsey Graham called this “the national security challenge of the 21st Century.”

Social media will probably always be highly influential and more money will be generated from news stories that divide, ads and personal data. Unfortunately, more screen time doesn’t mean more exposure to the truth.

These days, as we all know, nobody wants to watch or read anything that makes them think their opinions and ideas might be outdated. Everybody just wants information that reinforces biases. And when the Russian government found out, they launched influence campaigns to divide our country around sensitive social issues (in order to damage our democracy).

Pew Research Center report, 55% of the country gets their news “often” or “sometimes” from social media. You might not see it everyday, but the internet is full of lies, propaganda, calls for violence, and social media owners should have a moral responsibility to avoid amplifying information that divides us, threatens our democracy, threatens some of the ideals at the core of our Constitution.

Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 as a way to give the Internet a boost in regard to progress, but it also gave the owners of social media platforms very little responsibility for the things that people say and do, and that sort of immunity could lead to more hate groups, more lives lost.

I understand the First Amendment is first and I’m not for censorship, but it’s sort of happening anyway in the “terms of service,” so you might as well do something about the viral ideas and online brutality that turns into folks murdered in a synagogue, church, mosque, Walmart, school, and really almost everywhere.

Toxic speech online, that forces people to quit their jobs, teens to commit suicide, democracies to slide into totalitarianism, keeps exposing us to serious problems in the flesh and it shouldn’t be protected.

Will there be some trade-offs we don’t like, of course, but the government should recognize and break up monopolies in the tech industry, pass more legislation around transparency in political ad funding, hold social media platforms to the same standards we hold TV shows, radio, and newspapers, in order to save the republic.