By Christopher Mims
We're treated to fresh reports nearly every day about how
Facebook Inc.'s efforts to keep bad actors from abusing its
platform fall short. The latest include U.K. legislators' inquiry
into whether Russians used Facebook to influence recent British
elections, and reports that atrocities in Myanmar may be incited in
part by fake news on Facebook.
Even before this wave, Facebook's role in the spread of divisive
messages and outright falsehoods had inspired soul-searching at the
company, and a newfound humility at the top. In a string of blog
posts, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg promised to do more,
including hiring 1,000 additional people to review political ads
purchased on Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook Chief Operating Officer
Sheryl Sandberg was recently dispatched to Washington, D.C., on a
charm offensive.
Yet many outside Facebook refuse to wait for the company to
solve these problems -- and others yet to be uncovered -- on its
own. Pressure is mounting, at home and abroad, from legislators,
regulators and activists, all looking for various ways to nudge
and, in some cases, shove Facebook to acknowledge and act on its
responsibility as the most powerful distributor of news and
information on Earth.
While Twitter, Google's YouTube unit and many other social-media
platforms face similar problems, they don't all command the same
audience as Facebook. But what happens to Facebook will likely
apply to them all.
Compared with mature industries, the internet giants --
Facebook, Google, Twitter -- are relatively unregulated by federal
and state law. "That's what I think Facebook is most nervous
about," says Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University
School of Law who researches Facebook's legal and moral
responsibilities -- that "the sleeping giant wakes up and realizes
just how unregulated they are."
That "sleeping giant" includes legislators of every kind in the
U.S., Europe and elsewhere. While the current Congress is loath to
mint new regulations, that hasn't stopped Sens. John McCain (R.,
Ariz.), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Mark Warner (D., Va.) from
proposing the Honest Ads Act, which would force internet companies
to tell users who funded political ads. Most forms of mass media
are required to do this, but the Federal Election Commission
exempted Facebook and other internet sites in 2006, when online
political discourse was still nascent.
The new bill is an obvious way to bring the tech giants in line
with other media, with whom they clearly now compete, says Yochai
Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
What it won't solve is the even larger problem of Russia
creating content on Facebook that's compelling, aka enraging,
enough to go viral without paid promotion. Researchers found that
of the 470 sites created by Russia, the six which Facebook has
disclosed were shared a total of 340 million times -- suggesting a
total reach for all Russian content of billions of shares.
Twitter recently announced all its ads would provide a trace:
who paid for them, and how they were targeted at users. Facebook
will also roll out tools for increased transparency of political
ads and says they should be functional before the 2018 midterm
elections.
At the state level, Facebook is already fighting a battle with
regulators who would like to prevent the company from identifying
our faces without our express permission. State regulators could
succeed at holding Facebook accountable in ways Congress is
unwilling to. Another possibility is that America's increasingly
active state attorneys general could go after the company.
Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who's contemplating
a run for Illinois attorney general and has expertise in Facebook's
potential liability in the Russian influence operations, says it's
entirely plausible that state AGs will pursue the company's records
while trying to determine Facebook's culpability.
"I would be surprised if individual Facebook employees are
criminally liable for anything that happened, but I think a strong
argument can be made that if foreign powers advertise on Facebook,
there should be disclosure of the source," Mr. Mariotti says. "None
of those ads on Facebook would have been very effective if they
said 'paid for by Russia.' "
Last but not least, there's the impending threat of the European
Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Going into force in May
2018, it opens a Pandora's box of potential liabilities for all
tech companies around how they handle and exploit individuals'
data, guard against breaches and transfer information across
national borders.
For Facebook, it will mean new rules about disclosing what it
knows about its users. It will also mean sharp limits on what
Facebook can do with that data. For everything Facebook wants to do
with a user's data, it will have to ask explicit permission, and it
can't re-use the data for new purposes in the future.
The regulation is so sweeping, it could force all U.S. tech
companies to change how they operate everywhere, unless they build
separate systems just for Europe, says David Carroll, an advocate
for increased regulation of Facebook and an associate professor of
media design at the New School's Parsons School of Design.
In addition, EU citizens living in the U.S., and tourists from
Europe traveling here, could have standing to sue U.S. tech
companies.
Dr. Benkler at Harvard hopes Facebook will feel enough heat that
it starts offering details of its inner workings. He'd like the
company to share data (in a careful, anonymized way) about how
information spreads on the network and how advertising is targeted.
Independent researchers could then identify the extent of malicious
or harmful activity on the site.
"Maybe it turns out that fake news isn't a real concern, but at
the moment there is no way for us to know," Dr. Benkler says. "You
need an independent understanding of whether the garden has
occasional weeds, or whether the garden is overrun."
Broad, sweeping changes are likely coming to America's tech
giants. "All industries eventually get regulated," Mr. Carroll
says. But that assumes regulators can outlast the tech giants, and
not the other way around.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 29, 2017 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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