LIKE THE FRENCH police officer in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling in Rick’s Cafe, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, social media companies were “shocked” to discover violent anti-Semitic and white nationalist agitators lurking in plain sight on their platforms. With their usual earnest hypocrisy, the companies took action, banning tens of thousands of groups and individuals from the social media universe. Facebook and YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s accounts. Twitter permanently banned him.
Never mind that in the preceding days and weeks those same social media platforms hosted the planning for Jan. 6, or that for years they have profited from a business model that ignores truth and promotes outrage. But when some of their more unruly customers got off the leash and started threatening the people who write antitrust laws, Facebook, Google, and Twitter suddenly became tribunes of civility.
Of course, such monumental hypocrisy from Big Tech gave many Republican politicians the opportunity to change the subject from their own possible complicity in the insurrection to what they claim is suppression of free speech by the liberals in Silicon Valley. To this, clever liberals have replied that the First Amendment only applies to government, not to private corporations.
Lost in all this tit for tat is this one self-evident truth: A media universe in which anyone can say anything to everyone, without filters or gatekeepers, is simply not viable.
The real issue in the debate about social media censorship is not whether, or to what degree, free speech protections in the U.S. Constitution can apply to private, nongovernmental entities. Historically, courts have veered all over the map on that question. The real issue is how ubiquitous privately owned public utilities can be compelled to serve the public interest.
History suggests that those utilities must be subject to some form of public control. There is even a precedent for this that is directly applicable to the questions raised about free speech and social media today. Early in the 20th century, when radio and television first emerged as mass media, there was widespread concern that, in the wrong hands, they could become instruments for demagoguery and deception. The federal government responded by creating the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which issued licenses to broadcasters. Those renewable licenses came with requirements to devote a certain amount of time to commercial-free public interest programming, to provide roughly balanced coverage of public issues, and to provide equal time to voices on all sides of any public controversy.
This wasn’t a perfect system. It resulted in a lot of bland, risk-avoidant programming, but it never left us with a situation like at least one-third of our population believing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen. Regulation of social media in the public interest will require different sets of tools than the ones used for broadcast media, but it can be done if the public wants it badly enough.
The Biden administration could put the public interest first on this issue, but don’t bet on it. As this is written, there are reports that Biden’s selected attorney general, Merrick Garland, is planning to appoint a lawyer who once defended Facebook in an anti-competition lawsuit to be the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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