This is harsh but absolutely necessary.

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Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) has enable Internet companies to build hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of value largely unencumbered.  It has shielded these companies from liability for content created by their users and allowed them to manage the content on their platforms — however defamatory — as they seem fit. 

 

This provision has given these companies cover to remove or restrict posts they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”  One would hope, given this air-tight, blanket protection, these companies would just do the right thing.  One would hope they would have enacted policies, processes and procedures to protect our fellow Americans as well as our democracy.  But they have failed.  Miserably. 

 

Over the last few years we have, unfortunately, seen the Internet's dark side.  We have seen foreign countries maliciously attack our sacred elections (read more here).  Intimate photos of women have been posted without their consent for revenge, or just a cheap thrill.  Fake social media accounts have been created to harass and embarrass ex-boyfriends and girlfriends.  Terrorist propaganda accounts have been enabled and empowered.  Americans have been accused of murder and other horrible crimes, with zero evidence — openly defamed, maligned and slandered with little recourse.

 

We have seen social media companies shamelessly sell us out by not only failing to protect our personal information, but actively pimp it out; truth and productive discourse replaced by disinformation and hate speech.  Like a slow-moving car crash, we have seen the Internet morph from an innocent, cuddly Calico kitten into an irresponsible, out-of-control Bengal tiger — weaponized for the destruction of almost everything we hold dear, from our personal privacy to our hallowed democracy.

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The Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan commission ordered by Congress, put it this way:  “The digital connectivity that has brought economic growth, technological dominance, and an improved quality of life to nearly every American has also created a strategic dilemma. The more digital connections people make and data they exchange, the more opportunities adversaries have to destroy private lives, disrupt critical infrastructure, and damage our economic and democratic institutions.”  (read more here)

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We have to get a handle on this, and fast.  

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There are tons of issues that involve the Internet — everything from free speech to cybersecurity to online influence operations to cyber bullying — but the behavior of social media companies is at the top of the list.  What's the big deal, because Facebook and Twitter accounts are free anyway, right?  Not even close.  Many services in the digital economy appear to be free, but you actually pay for them with your data.  In fact, your personal information is a currency far more valuable to social media companies than if you paid them a monthly fee.  Companies like Facebook not only own a mind-boggling pool of personal data, but they also possess an unprecedented “social graph” which allows them to know not only the desires and habits of their members, but how their members are connected and interact with their other members. 

 

That said, because of this model, these companies need us more than we need them.  They need as many of us as possible to participate, because their survival depends on “network effects” — the more people they have using their services, the more valuable their service is.  This fact alone gives all of us users not only tremendous power, but a reason to act.  

 

...and not a moment too soon, because the breadth and depth of the irresponsibility of these social media companies is appalling.  

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In July 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that revealed all fifty states were targeted by Russia in the 2016 election.  Read the entire report here.​  According to a 37-page federal indictment of thirteen Russian nationals issued by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, leading to the 2016 presidential election the Russians stole Americans' identities, created fake drivers' licenses, bank accounts, and PayPal accounts in the names of fictitious Americans, faked social media accounts, created and distributed inflammatory digital ads and images, organized political rallies on U.S. soil, and even had two operatives on the ground in America.  The pair traveled to at least nine states posing as tourists to gather information for their bosses back in Russia.  Read the entire indictment here.  The indictment mentions Facebook and Instagram 41 times. Facebook finally admitted that divisive, Russian-placed political content reached 146 million Americans on their platform alone.  Read more about the responsibility of social media platforms here.

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Two other studies clarify even further how Russia exploited data provided by social media firms.

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The first, from the University of Oxford and Graphika, found that "Between 2013 and 2018, the Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns reached tens of millions of users in the United States; over 30 million users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way; peaks in advertising and organic activity often correspond to important dates in the U.S. political calendar, crises, and international events; IRA activities focused on the U.S. began on Twitter in 2013 but quickly evolved into a multi-platform strategy involving Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube among other platforms; and the most far reaching IRA activity is in organic posting, not advertisements."

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Further, "Russia’s IRA activities were designed to polarize the U.S. public and interfere in elections by: campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to distrust U.S. institutions; encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum." 

 

"Surprisingly, these campaigns did not stop once Russia’s IRA was caught interfering in the 2016 election. Engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters.  The highest peak of IRA ad volume on Facebook is in April 2017 – the month of the Syrian missile strike, the use of the Mother of All Bombs on ISIS tunnels in eastern Afghanistan, and the release of the tax reform plan; IRA posts on Instagram and Facebook increased substantially after the election, with Instagram seeing the greatest increase in IRA activity; the IRA accounts actively engaged with disinformation and practices common to Russian “trolling.” Some posts referred to Russian troll factories that flooded online conversations with posts, others denied being Russian trolls, and some even complained about the platforms’ alleged political biases when they faced account suspension."  Read the entire report here.

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The second study, from New Knowledge, revealed in part the following:  "The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted Black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets; the IRA created an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem;  the IRA exploited the trust of their Page audiences to develop human assets, at least some of whom were not aware of the role they played. This tactic was substantially more pronounced on Black-targeted accounts; the degree of integration into authentic Black community media was not replicated in the otherwise Right-leaning or otherwise Left-leaning content."

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The report continues, "Despite statements from Twitter and Facebook debating whether it was possible to gauge whether voter suppression content was present, there were three primary variants of specific voter suppression narratives spread on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube:  Malicious misdirection (Twitter-based text-to-vote scams, tweets designed to create confusion about voting rules); Candidate support redirection (‘vote for a 3rd party!’); and Turnout depression (‘stay home on Election Day, your vote doesn’t matter’).  Read the entire report here.

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Time and time again these companies have shown zero regard for their actions.  Their irresponsible behavior does not stop with enabling ​Russian bots, or the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories or hate speech.  They have also punted on basic human decency.  For example, in 2018, Facebook employees created a slide presentation as part of an internal effort to understand how Facebook shapes user behavior, and how the company could possibly alleviate potential harmful effects.  One of the slides said:  “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.  If left unchecked, Facebook would feed users more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”  Founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, along with other senior members of his team, essentially buried the results of the research and, once again, made the conscious decision to ignore their company's negative impact on society.  What's even more sickening is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias."  It's just gross.

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The Wall Street Journal also reports that "a 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform.  Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes.  Most of them were private or secret.  The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth.  The 2016 presentation states that '64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools' and that most of the activity came from the platform’s Groups You Should Join and Discover algorithms: Our recommendation systems grow the problem.'”

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So, with all of that evidence, surely Facebook finally did the right thing?   Certainly after the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) $5 billion civil penalty against Facebook, "the largest ever imposed on a company anywhere for violating consumers’ privacy?"  < this penalty, by the way, started in 2012, when the FTC charged Facebook with eight separate privacy-related violations.  "To settle that case, Facebook agreed to an order that, among other things: 1) prohibited Facebook from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ information, 2) prohibited Facebook from misrepresenting the extent to which it shares personal data, and 3) required Facebook to implement a reasonable privacy program.  According to the FTC, Facebook flouted that order in multiple ways, and today’s settlement holds them accountable for putting profits over their privacy promises." >

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Nope.  They cannot even be counted on during the darkest of our days, like during the most agonizing weeks in modern memory, when Americans, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and subsequent economic turmoil, were enraged and broken-hearted over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.  Instead of bringing the country together in the midst of chaos and grief, these companies enabled what is the equivalent of bomb-throwing.  Instead of providing positive, productive discourse, they allowed hundreds of inflammatory posts saying that George Floyd was not actually dead after all; that blamed George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, of funding the violent riots; that accused the antifascism activist movement antifa of coordinating the riots, and on and on and on...

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Twitter finally shut down multiple accounts of a White supremacist group posing as a national “antifa” organization that was inciting violence in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement.  However, it's just too little, too late. 

 

No matter what these guys are suddenly promising to do now, we simply cannot rely on self-policing for the long term.  Because there is so much at stake we have to bring the thunder.  The conversation around this debate in Washington seems to revolve around the question:  Are these social media enterprises simply platforms in service of their users, or are they publishers?  Our take is that it really doesn't matter.  Either way — because of their size and scale of impact on communication, media and civil society as a whole — these companies have an enormous social responsibility that they have abdicated, and they must be held accountable.  The good news is that it is absolutely possible to strike an appropriate balance between guardrails and innovation. 

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Enough is enough.

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Evidence:

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United States.  "Cyberspace Solarium Commission."  March 2020

Jessica Guynn.  "Facebook Expands Scope of Russian Influence on Americans for Second Time."  USA Today.  1 Nov 2017

James Andrew Lewis.  “After the Breach: The Monetization and Illicit Use of Stolen Data.”  Statement Before the House Committee on Financial Services   Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance.  15 Mar 2018​

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.  "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election."  Volume II of II.  March
   2019

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.  "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election."  Volume I of II.  March
   2019

Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, Dimitra Liotsiou, John Kelly, and Camille François.  "The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States,
   2012-2018."  University of Oxford and Graphika.  Computational Propaganda Research Project. 

Renee DiResta, Dr. Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox, Dr. Jonathan Albright and Ben Johnson.  "The Tactics & Tropes of
   the Internet Research Agency."

Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman.  "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive."  Wall Street Journal.  26 Mar 2020

United States.  Federal Trade Commission.  Lesley Fair.  "FTC’s $5 billion Facebook Settlement: Record-Breaking and History-Making." 24 July 2019

Ben Collins, Brandy Zadrozny and Emmanuelle Saliba.  "White Nationalist Group Posing As Antifa Called for Violence on Twitter."  NBC News.  1 June 2020