Regulating Facebook is the answer
You can do anything on Facebook. Whether it be finding a long-lost friend, starting a business, engaging in a community or even manipulating an election, Facebook is more than just a tool for your parents to share family photos and cat memes. It is home to businesses, communities, advertisers and artists, with more than two billion users worldwide. Since its founding, Facebook has easily grown to become one of the most influential and powerful corporations in the world.
Last week, former Facebook employee Francis Haugen blew the whistle on the company’s deliberate pattern of ignoring internally known failures to protect the public. Unsurprisingly, they chose to maximize already astronomical profits instead of making necessary change.
Facebook’s internal data showed that Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, as well as the Facebook app itself have led to mental disorders and suicidal thoughts in teenage girls and political violence around the world. The apps have also contributed to the growing tension in America’s political culture.
Other problems which have been highlighted in recent years are Facebook’s inability to equally enforce its policies and standards. Being banned or suspended from Facebook means more than simply not being able to share family photos. For some, it could mean a loss in a business. If all users are not being seen as equals under Facebook’s policies, the ability for Facebook to force real-world outcomes is frightening.
Whether it be the threats to election security, the lack of clear and fair speech policies and even danger to children, all of these problems culminate in a simple answer: Facebook should be regulated.
Those on the right, left and even Facebook itself agree, the only question before us is how.
The last serious effort to regulate the internet was more than 20 years ago, and as any internet user could tell you, the internet has become a much different place since. We need to stop forcing policy written in the 1990s on companies of the 2020s.
The median age of Congress is 61 years old, and if questions asked during congressional hearings are any indication, most of our “representatives” know very little about the inner workings of social media or the internet. Dozens of YouTube montages can be found of members of Congress asking Mark Zuckerberg and other big tech CEOs ridiculous questions. Most recently, when Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut asked a Facebook executive why Instagram hasn’t “ended finstas.”
While it’s clear Congress doesn’t know how to regulate big tech, it seems like the public doesn’t quite know either. In fact, it seems the only people who can find solutions are the big tech companies themselves.
The apps and technology we use each day are so new to our world, it’s unimaginable where they can take us. With so many complexities and nuances, regulating a social media company will take more than just one law or policy. While most of these complexities have no clear solution in sight, one could be the collection of data by these super-companies.
As seen in 2018 with Facebook’s massive Cambridge Analytica data breach, tech and media companies can collect millions of pieces of data from each swipe and click. In turn, they sell this data to other companies, primarily advertisers, who then target consumers.
Facebook makes money from our data: the patterns our fingers make, the frequency we pick up our phones, the things we search for and the sites we visit. If anyone deserves to make money off data it’s the creators and owners of that data, not Facebook.
We’re at a critical point where we might not know how to regulate all the nuances and dangers associated with the internet, but we must accept that regulation is the answer.
