Thursday, January 30, 2025

Ownership of Twitter and Facebook is a Big Deal, Who Would Have Known?


 January 30, 2025
Facebook

President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office – Public Domain

I’m always happy when something I and others have been talking about for years makes it to the New York Times. For that reason, I was happy that New York Times columnist Ezra Klein seems to have discovered that owning a huge social media platform gives a person enormous political power. Unfortunately, Klein could do little more than note the problem. I guess the NYT didn’t authorize him to consider solutions.

For people who actually do pay attention to such issues, it has long been apparent that owning a Facebook or Twitter gives people enormous control over public debate. There has always been a problem with control of the media by rich people and large corporations, and not just when they explicitly use it to advance a political agenda, as with Fox News.

It should not be surprising that news outlets that are controlled by millionaires and billionaires will tend to be more sympathetic to stories that fit with their view of the world. That means proposals for corporate tax cuts are likely to get more sympathetic coverage than proposals from the likes of Bernie Sanders or labor leaders pushing for a higher minimum wage or Medicare for All.

But the big social media platforms take this problem to a new level. Going back two decades, CBS News and the New York Times were incredibly valuable real estate in terms of controlling public debate, but it was possible for others to get in the game and still score points.

That is very different when an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg can decide what hundreds of millions of people will or will not see. In Musk’s case, he decided that we need to see the Nazi nonsense that apparently is close to his heart. His algorithm, apparently downgrades material pushing political sentiments of which he disapproves, as is also the case with Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The owners of social media platforms can do this. It is considered their First Amendment right. However, Congress has also decided to privilege these multi-billionaires with the special privilege of Section 230 protection. This means that not only can Musk, Zuckerberg, and the rest, freely decide what you will and will not see on their platforms, unlike print or broadcast media, they are protected against defamation lawsuits for spreading harmful lies.

This means that if Elon Musk allows nonsense about one of his political enemies being a pedophile to go to 200 million people, the person has no recourse against Elon Musk. That is the case even if Musk got paid to spread this lie by a person taking out an ad on his platform.

Note this is 180 degrees at odds with the standards for print and broadcast media. If they spread defamatory material by a third party, they are liable for damages. In fact, this is exactly what the Dominion case against Fox News was about. Fox repeatedly brought people on its news shows who lied about Dominion flipping votes from Trump to Biden. Spreading these lies cost the network $787 million to settle a defamation suit.

There is a similar issue with print media. If a letter to the editor, an unpaid column, or an ad is defamatory, the paper itself is liable, not just the person who wrote it. In fact, the famous New York Times v. Sullivan case, which set the standard for libel for a public figure, was not about anything the paper wrote. It was about an ad taken out in the paper.

There is an obvious logic to this standard. A person standing on a street corner making defamatory claims about a person or company probably won’t have much impact. However, if they can get their lies wholesaled by a newspaper, a television network, or Elon Musk’s social media platform, then they can inflict serious damage.

There is also the logic that these outlets can profit by spreading the lie. In the case of a paid ad, the source of the profit is obvious, but even when there is no money directly changing hands, the outlet can still profit. Spreading absurd lies about the 2020 election may have brought more viewers and advertisers to Fox. The same holds true with Elon Musk and his social media platform.

The question then is why does Congress feel the need to let Elon Musk and other social media platforms profit from spreading defamatory claims, when they would never consider providing the same protection to print or broadcast media?

One argument that proponents of Section 230 protection often make is that it would be impossible for a social media platform to preemptively police everything that gets posted for defamatory content. This is true but irrelevant.

We don’t have to write the law that they are liable simply by virtue of the material being posted. We can require that they respond to take-down notices, just as we do with copyright enforcement. In the case of copyrights, a social media site is protected from a lawsuit for infringement, if they promptly remove the material in question after having been notified.

There is no reason that we cannot have a similar standard for social media sites. Obviously, this will require that they have some number of fact-checkers and lawyers on site to assess the validity of a defamation claim. But print and broadcast outlets have been dealing with this issue for decades and the people who run those outlets can’t be that much smarter than Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

We can also structure the law in a way that benefits smaller platforms, which can offset some of the network effects that tend to favor the giants in the industry. We could continue to allow Section 230 protection to outlets that don’t make money from advertising or selling personal information. This would favor sites that survive on subscription income or donations.

I don’t imagine Congress is about to pass something like this for the same reason they are unlikely to do anything that challenges the power of the oligarchs. Nonetheless, it is still worth getting it on the table as a possible solution. Even if the odds are long, it is still worth reminding everyone that people like Musk and Zuckerberg are not incredibly rich because of the wonders of the free market, but rather because they got the government to give them special help.

Who knows, maybe one day we will even get someone at the New York Times to talk about this or other solutions to the ridiculous power that we have given to the owners of the giant social media platforms. Getting them to at least notice this power is a big first step.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

No comments: