Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Be Regulated

Of course, he does, the cynic would say.  It’s the best way to protect himself – and his money.  In an Op-Ed in The Washington Post last week,¹ Mr. Zuckerberg called for regulation of the Internet.  Among other things, he wants “a globally harmonized framework” for privacy and data protection.  He suggests that third party bodies set standards on distribution of harmful content.   And he wants laws on “verifying” those who buy/pay for political ads and political speech.

There will be plenty of legislators willing to take Mr. Zuckerberg up on his request.  There is nothing that many people in Washington like more than passing laws and looking like they are doing something.²  Plus regulating speech on the Internet is a great way for incumbents to protect their jobs. 

The trouble with Mr. Zuckerberg’s call for world-wide standards is what some countries are already doing.  Australia just passed legislation, on basically two days’ notice, that could put executives in jail for failing to remove “abhorrent violent material” quickly enough from their sites.³ Germany fines companies for “hate speech,”⁴ and Great Britain is reviewing the possibility of assessing big fines for “harmful content” on the Internet.”⁵  

While I understand Mr. Zuckerberg is trying to protect himself and his company, the question is who is going to be deciding these questions.  Are political ads, etc., going to be reviewed by people who think Donald Trump should be in jail or those who feel the same way about former Secretary of State Clinton?  When so many people see those who disagree with them on issues like ____ [fill in your own black-and-white issue] as beyond the pale, do we have enough people who can be trusted to honestly write rules that won’t favor their own side?

I see the need to make sure Russia, et al, don’t interfere with our electoral process, but I would feel better about identifying the people who paid for political ads, if there were fewer calls for boycotting, or even firing, those who disagree with what some people think is obvious truth.

Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t suggest that government should be setting the rules on what is “harmful” and what is not (thankfully), but how much confidence do we have in non-governmental third parties making those decisions when the Twitter account of the movie “Unplanned” was somehow suspended for a while during its opening weekend?⁶

It would be nice if there could be rational rules to keep things like the video of Christchurch mass murder off the Internet.  The real question is who among us can be trusted, in this hyper-partisan time, to set such rules in way that doesn’t also favor their own side of the political debate.  Part of the problem, of course, is that an awful lot of people think the other side on the certain issues is not just wrong but immoral and evil. 

Ultimately, if we want to see why it is so difficult to deal with these questions, it might just be a matter of looking in the mirror.
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¹ Published by Mr. Zuckerberg’s fellow-billionaire Jeff Bezos.  It’s nice to have friends.
² Even if they never go back to see if the laws are actually doing what they were supposed to do.  That would take work; it’s easier to just take credit.
³ Mr. Zuckerberg may want to stay out of Sydney for a while.
⁴ In response to those who say Germany needs such “hate speech” laws because of their experience with the Nazis, I note that Germany had hate speech laws in the early 1930s.  (Flemming Rose, The Tyranny of Silence {2014}, p. 61.)  You can see how well they worked. 
     With respect to the question of anti-hate speech laws to protect various religions, Flemming Rose, in The Tyranny of Silence (p. 138), writes:

“One insight came in 1994 in Moscow, when classified documents were made public containing minutes of Politburo discussions on [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn in the period 1963 to 1979.  The arguments put forward by the communist high priests were riddled with religious metaphor ….
One factory worker in Moscow wrote as follows to a Soviet newspaper in late 1973 when new of the Gulag Archipelago first emerged: ‘Solzhenitsyn smears our socialist system and its advances.  All we have achieve thanks to the work of the Soviet people, all that is sacred and dear to each and every Soviet citizen, is rejected by this apostate.’”

In other words, what doesn’t rise to the level of a religion today?
⁵ In between totally screwing up Brexit.
⁶ “Unplanned” is a movie about a Planned Parenthood employee who turns into a pro-life (aka anti-choice) activist.  The fact that some people don’t have a problem with the fact the movie’s Twitter account was somehow shut down for a while, supports my point.

Comments

[Bob]

Nice post