Former US president Barack Obama is the latest prominent figure to speak out over the power wielded by the social media giants.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama said that the manner in which social media companies claim they “are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic” is not “tenable,” in an interview with the latter publication on Monday.
“They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not,” Obama said. “The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse. If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. We’re pretty close to that now.”
Companies such as Facebook have frequently insisted they’re facilitators of information and prefer not to get overtly involved in content decisions. That method is made possible by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech platforms from being held liable for their users’ posts—a far greater protection than that applied to publishers. But in recent times the platforms have been under pressure to take a more proactive role in moderating the content they allow users to publish. That practice is protected by Section 230. It’s what enables companies such as Facebook and Twitter to take down posts promoting terrorism or self-harm without fear of legal repercussions.
President-elect Joe Biden strongly criticized Section 230 and Facebook itself in an interview with The New York Times editorial board published earlier this year.
“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For (Mark) Zuckerberg and other platforms,” Biden said at the time, taking a more controversial position than many of the Democrats and Republicans currently seeking to tweak the laws’ protections.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Obama’s comments in The Atlantic. Yet they and other tech companies have repeatedly pointed out the value of Section 230. They often argue the law is a necessity for small start-ups in order to avoid becoming hit by petty lawsuits.
The irony of Obama’s comments is that advocates for tech regulation reform generally view his administration as a period of under-regulation and mollycoddling of the sector that may have exacerbated the market concentration in the industry today.
The former president made clear in his Atlantic interview that he does not “hold the tech companies entirely responsible” for misinformation making it harder to get Americans on the same page and listen to facts during the pandemic. He said the issue “predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it.”
Obama also told NPR that consumers must also take some responsibility in thinking critically about what they see on the internet.
When “you look at these information silos in Facebook and other social media and the rabbit holes that people are following, the denial of facts, the belief in wild conspiracy theories like QAnon getting real traction, each of us have some responsibilities to start thinking carefully about not being so gullible and just accepting whatever it is that we’re seeing pop up on our phones,” he said.
