The doctored video falsely depicting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as ill or drunk spreading on social media is a wake-up call that even as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, there is still no playbook for how the social media companies should respond to disinformation campaigns. While YouTube removed the video, Facebook did not, deciding only to reduce its rank and attach a caution that additional reporting is available.
This episode will only buttress the calls of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to break up the company using re-invigorated U.S. antitrust law. It will fortify the insistence on tougher privacy laws, especially if the Federal Trade Commission’s settlement of Facebook’s ongoing privacy violations is perceived to be an insufficient deterrent.
More competition and privacy controls are necessary, but they won’t fix the problem of disinformation spread by foreign actors and political operatives. Instead, we should be looking to another policy tradition for more tailored remedies: media policy.
While social media companies and digital networks are relatively new, the problems of information laundering and manipulation are not. Before Facebook and Twitter, newspapers and broadcasters posed similar threats—and new norms and policy solutions were developed and adopted to advance the public interest over hidden influence and concentrated power. While the rules of analog media cannot be grafted onto cyberspace, the concerns and principles behind them can and should inform how we address the challenges of today.
In every period of communications and political upheaval, from the Communications Act of 1936 to the 1947 Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press to the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, the challenge was to make media serve democracy and not undermine it. But as the years went on and political debate, advertising and news cons ..
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