The Facebook Whistleblower Is Heroic… And Terribly Wrong – by Matt Stoller – BIG by Matt Stoller
Still, I think a digital regulator is a terrible idea, and I m going to explain why. Start with the most basic red flag, which is that Facebook s top leadership wants it too. I m not someone who reflexively reacts to an opponent, but there s a reason that this regulated monopoly framework, undergirded by a digital regulator, is shared by both Haugen and Zuckerberg. On philosophical grounds, Haugen doesn t see a problem with such a concentration of power, or rather, she believes it is inevitable that such a concentration will exist because of the dynamics of advertising markets.
Yet it is the concentration of power in the hands of a small group is the fundamental political and economic problem with Facebook. We have never allowed one man to set rules for communication networks that structure the information ecosystem of billions of people. But that is the situation we re in. We have to radically decentralize this power. But a regulatory overlay in some ways would worsen the problem, because it would explicitly fuse political control with market power over speech and it would legitimize the dominant monopoly position of Facebook (Common carriers have an antitrust exemption from FTC rules). The right is suspicious of such a regulator because they are afraid of what Biden and the left would do with it. But I suspect that suspicion isn t out of place on the left either. If you are a Democrat, imagine, for instance, if Trump were able to pick a regulator for social media, to negotiate with Zuckerberg on how to run global discourse. Better not to have such concentrated power in the first place!