[After all, Congress typically does not require subject matter expertise of its members. Most politicians in Washington did not understand the complexities of mortgage-backed securities in 2009, when Wall Street executives testified in the wake of the financial crisis. The lawmakers also are not pharmaceutical experts, or transportation policy wonks or deeply knowledgeable in many of the other complex issues that come before them. And yet, Congress — with the help of staff experts and outside advisers — has managed to pass sweeping legislation to prevent excesses and bad behavior in those sectors.]
By Kevin Roose
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Members
of Congress had a mixed bag of concerns for Mark Zuckerberg this week,
including
points about Facebook’s privacy and data collection policies.
Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
|
WASHINGTON
— When it comes to regulating Facebook, Congress
is in over its head. But does that matter?
This week’s marathon testimony by Mark
Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, revealed the limited
understanding many lawmakers have of what Facebook is and how it works. Members
of Congress came with a mixed bag of concerns for Mr. Zuckerberg, including a
few incisive points about Facebook’s privacy and data collection policies and a
lot of off-topic ramblings about how computers work, but these questions never
amounted to a unified theory of Facebook’s troubles, or suggestions of how they
might be solved.
It’s tempting to claim that technological
illiteracy is the problem — that some older and tech-phobic lawmakers are
fundamentally incapable of regulating Facebook properly.
But I want to suggest another takeaway. The
biggest obstacle to regulating Facebook is not Congress’s lack of computer
literacy, which gave Mr. Zuckerberg the upper hand this week. It’s a lack of
political will, and an unwillingness to identify the problems they’re trying to
fix in the first place.
After all, Congress typically does not require
subject matter expertise of its members. Most politicians in Washington did not
understand the complexities of mortgage-backed securities in 2009, when Wall
Street executives testified in the wake of the financial crisis. The lawmakers
also are not pharmaceutical experts, or transportation policy wonks or deeply
knowledgeable in many of the other complex issues that come before them. And
yet, Congress — with the help of staff experts and outside advisers — has
managed to pass sweeping legislation to prevent excesses and bad behavior in
those sectors.
“It’s never an issue of the members being able
to do it — their staff is often incredibly dedicated and can dig into these
issues,” said Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade
Commission. The challenge, Mr. Soltani said, is that there’s a “lost in
translation” problem of trying to condense complex, multifaceted issues into
easily digested sound bites that will play well with constituents.
“This isn’t just about news,” Mr. Soltani said
of Facebook’s issues. “It’s not just about privacy and commercialization, it’s
not just about political speech. It’s all of those things and more.”
If Congress wants to rein in Facebook’s
enormous power — and the questions lawmakers asked left little doubt that it
does — then the first step is identifying what, specifically, they think is
wrong with Facebook.
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Offices
at the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Congressional hearings this week
proved
that
a groundswell of support is building on Capitol Hill to regulate Facebook and
other
internet companies. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times
|
Is it that Facebook is too cavalier about
sharing user data with outside organizations?
Is it that Facebook collects too much data
about users in the first place?
Is it that Facebook is promoting addictive
messaging products to children?
Is it that Facebook’s news feed is polarizing
society, pushing people to ideological fringes?
Is it that Facebook is too easy for political
operatives to exploit, or that it does not do enough to keep false news and
hate speech off users’ feeds?
Is it that Facebook is simply too big, or a
monopoly that needs to be broken up?
All of these are concerns lawmakers brought up
during this week’s hearings, and they would all require different and narrowly
tailored regulatory solutions.
For example, Congress’s goal may be to stop
outside companies from getting access to people’s Facebook data — avoiding
another scandal like the one involving Cambridge Analytica, the political
consulting firm that improperly obtained data on up to 87 million Facebook
users. Lawmakers could propose a bill that would prevent large social media
platforms from opening themselves up to outside developers. (They should note,
though, that Facebook has already limited the data available to outside companies,
so this would not necessarily have the intended effect.)
Congress could address the issue of data
collection by adopting European-style data protection policies, requiring
stronger user controls for personal information or requiring social networks to
delete certain types of user data automatically after a given time.
If it wanted to, Congress could address the
issue of hateful content by adopting strict hate speech laws like the ones that
exist in Germany, which make social platforms liable if they fail to remove
hate speech in a timely manner.
It could address the problem of transparency in
political ads by passing the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would subject online
political ads to similar disclosure standards as TV and radio political ads.
(Mr. Zuckerberg has already indicated that he supports the measure, so this
should be an easy one.)
Or, if it decides that Facebook is just too
darn big, Congress could spearhead an effort to break it up.
All of these are theoretically possible
outcomes, depending on which of Facebook’s many issues lawmakers decide to
address. Lawmakers do not need to be computer scientists, or to come up with an
omnibus bill to address all of Facebook’s flaws in one fell swoop. It could
pick off one issue at a time, consult with the experts and take a piecemeal
approach.
But first, it needs to understand which pieces
need fixing, and how to carry out fixes without creating unintended
consequences. And it needs to demonstrate that it has the political resolve to
push these changes through, even as the tech industry furiously lobbies against
them, as it undoubtedly will.
Perhaps the most dispiriting exchange all week
was when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, asked Mr.
Zuckerberg about Facebook’s market power, and the notion that it is too
dominant for any other social network to compete with.
“Is there an alternative to Facebook in the
private sector?” Mr. Graham asked.
Mr. Zuckerberg dodged the question, saying that
people use lots of apps to communicate.
“You don’t feel like you have a monopoly?” Mr.
Graham wondered.
“It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me,” Mr.
Zuckerberg said.
By raising the issue of Facebook’s lack of
competition, Mr. Graham was circling around an important point. Facebook has,
indeed, taken steps to acquire or crush multiple apps that have posed a
competitive threat. It even runs a service called Onavo, which allows it to
keep tabs on which other apps its users are using and functions as a kind of
early-warning system for possible competitors.
But when it came time to draw the conclusion
his questions had been leading to — that Facebook’s primary problem was its
size, and that regulation should address its anticompetitive tendencies — Mr.
Graham pulled his punches, even asking Mr. Zuckerberg for advice about
regulating his own company.
“Would you work with us in terms of what
regulations you think are necessary in your industry?” Mr. Graham asked.
This week’s hearings proved that a groundswell
of support is building on Capitol Hill to regulate Facebook and other internet
companies. But until Congress stops asking these companies how they want to be
regulated and starts making its own decisions about what problems it wants to
fix, its targets will continue to slip through its fingers.
Email Kevin Roose at kevin.roose@nytimes.com,
or follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/kevinroose and on Twitter:
@kevinroose.
