Regulating the New Media Monsters by Lichen Craig

As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, finished up his testimony on Capitol Hill today, he was repeatedly asked to comment on the idea of government-led regulation. The concept of regulation of large social media platforms, and regulation in general for the internet, raises red flags for many a libertarian thinker. But a few facts might help the alarm bell stop ringing - at least for now.

Facebook, and its comrades Google (which owns YouTube), and Twitter, were originally formed in an age when the internet was just starting to be used for news dissemination. That was a few decades back. Now, these platforms have grown to serve as a daily home for public discourse; they have become the public square of the colonial era - here, everyone gets a voice, no matter how misinformed. This was the climate in which ideas like the vote for the common man, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - which protected the free speech of citizens - were born. In that sense, they serve an exciting new purpose.

However, as this phenomenon of social platforms has grown, the inherent evils they present are increasingly visible and increasingly disruptive. That's why today we find ourselves listening to the likes of Zuckerberg - a man-child who knows software and understands little about much else, if one judges by his testimony - try to explain away the lack of responsibility displayed by his company policy.

Libertarians and advocates of free speech should understand that the idea of government regulation in media conversation is not new. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) introduced in 1949 a policy that required broadcasters to 1) devote some airtime to discussing issues of public importance, and 2) discuss both sides of the issue equally, or in a manner that was deemed "honest, equitable and balanced". This was known as the Fairness Doctrine. It was akin to an earlier rule imposed on broadcast radio in the 1920's known as the "Equal Time Rule" - which required that if a candidate or the candidate's advertisers received air time, the opposing candidate would be offered equal time and at a fair advertising price.

It is because of this tradition of the Fairness Doctrine ideology that cable news talk shows, radio, and major broadcasters today try to present pundits discussing both sides of the argument - or at least they did until Obama's election, when this commitment to fairness seemed to disappear. In 1987 the Doctrine was abolished when then-president Reagan vetoed a bill that would have turned the rule into law. This opposition was then a Republican-backed commitment to freedom of speech. The reasoning was that 1) the Fairness Doctrine allowed government interference in communications to an unacceptable degree - interfering with the spirit of the First Amendment, and 2) it took away from broadcasters their right to self-determination that they enjoyed through running their own programs in the way they saw fit. In 1987 it was clear-cut - the conservatives opposed the Doctrine as excessive regulation by a big government entity (the FCC) and the liberal Democrats wanted the Doctrine because it would force broadcasters to give equal time to the liberal viewpoint.

In the 1990's, these battle lines held, because the growth of talk radio came with various conservative personalities who wielded the power to mold public discourse, which the Democrats in Congress saw as a threat.  Republicans held firm that the Doctrine would be unnecessary regulation on the free discourse of ideas, from big government.

But then came the internet. And everything shifted.

Then, the growth of "chat rooms" on political sites, and social media platforms and giants like AOL and

Google, started to affect public discourse in unexpected ways. When Obama came to power, he opposed the Fairness Doctrine or anything resembling it; his administration stated officially that they believed in the wide dissemination of as many viewpoints as possible on the internet, and that reimposing the Doctrine would amount to excessive government regulation. This was a somewhat contradictory position, given that in the past the Democrats embraced regulation. But the internet was a new animal, and by the early 2000's when Obama came to power, the internet - populated mostly by younger generations - was becoming a hotbed of liberal thought. Obama and the liberals had a vested interest, politically, in protecting it.

But here we are in 2018, and now, beginning with last year's Congressional hearings with social platform companies and today's testimony from Zuckerberg, legislators on both sides are openly advocating for greater regulation for the internet. Ironically, the bipartisan spirit is not born of a commitment to equal, balanced discourse, but of a desire to stop the overstep of large entities to collect and sell private data on users. The bipartisan concern has forced, in effect, a larger conversation on the need for regulation.

That conversation is in its infancy. In coming months, there will be posturing along political party lines. Conservative legislators will be all over the place - now, their commitment to limiting the reach of big government will have to be balanced by their concern over the censorship of conservative speech to an enormous degree by social media companies. It is a demonstrable fact that Facebook and Twitter, and Google's baby YouTube, have blatantly and unapologetically been squelching the posts of conservatives to a much heavier degree than those of liberals. This is a matter of increasingly wide concern, both in the public and in Congress.

Indeed, the ability of these large companies, founded by a demographic that favors a liberal viewpoint, and physically located in liberal-heavy cities, to drive public information to a far Left view, is alarming to many moderates and conservatives. If we want our social discourse to be fair, accurate and balanced, things have to be regulated - perhaps as they were by the Equal Time Rule and the Fairness Doctrine in the early 20th century.

We have come to a point where the information released by our mass media - from major TV networks to cable news channels to radio and podcasts - is so unbalanced as to render it mostly propaganda. Studies show that many people get the majority, if not all, of their news from the likes of Facebook and Twitter - where all news is soaked in bias, and usually a liberal bias (this is also widely demonstrated by studies, which suggest that up to 90% of coverage of the current president is "negative", or even inaccurate).

If we, as a people, are to be committed to fairness, we must insist upon a fair balance of information in the public. We must insist upon some degree of honesty. We are at a tipping point, where the average person cannot find accurate information upon which to base his or her opinion, upon which he or she bases a vote. And that is terribly dangerous in a "free" society that is fast becoming not so free.

During the coming months, we will see ideas about regulation of large social media companies discussed by the government. This is on its face a chilling idea: the danger becomes that the government becomes invested, itself, in pushing a certain viewpoint. The balance of two dangers: a media that presents one point of view, and a government that silences one point of view - will always be present.

But we have got to find a way to do it - to allow some regulation of internet discussion. Because we are indeed living in a new world - where communication technology changes at lightening speed, and thus far, knows no limits. Human beings being the political animals and the liars that they are, it could all go terribly, terribly wrong.