How many scandals and how much harm does it take to reform social media?  Evidently, not enough. Nothing will change unless two things are true:  (1) threaten the money and (2) prosecute violators. As Scott Galloway said so eloquently, unless there’s a “perp walk” nothing will change (“there’s nothing like the specter of criminal remedies”).  So why have neither of these things happened?  Are legislative fixes nibbles or is there an appetite to swallow the whole mess?  (If history is any guide, nibbles are the only thing on the menu.) Want to really change things? Enforce personal financial and criminal consequences for social media misbehavior.

All of the legislative fixes proposed these days about how to fix social media are fine and good.  Some of them will help – to some extent – to reduce the clear dangers that social media poses to the social, economic and political systems of many countries – not just the US.  Nibbles can be a little satisfying when you’re on a legislative diet.  But the problems won’t go away.  You will be hungry for a full meal soon when another bombshell drops on how social media companies actually operate and evidence of some ugly new transgressions – for money and power — appears.

The real problems?  Money, power and the lack of criminality.  As skilled negotiators know, study the motivations and incentives of the participants.  So who wins here?  The obvious winners are the billionaires and multi-millionaires who personally profit from the social platforms they sell.  The number of profiteers here – including employees, shareholders, investors, advertisers and vendors – is huge. Social media is a financial juggernaut, its own enormous, unstoppable profit machine.  (Ask shareholders if they’d favor legislative control if it means the value of their social media stock portfolio falls.)  

Next, look at the political money sloshing around social media.  Are there any political contributions to candidates?  Any money to Political Action Committees (PACs)?  Lobbyists?  What about companies who display ads to social media participants?  The last thing they want is a decline in participation (though they wouldn’t mind if the cost of ads decreased).

Power is the other side of money, especially in the US (and everywhere, for that matter) where money equates to power and vice versa.  Those with vested interests in how social media behaves often – always? – have a power agenda.  Media, business and politicians have an obvious vested interest in what citizens see, hear and buy.  Tons of research proves that much of what appears on social media is false and misleading (at best), but research also proves that social and political agendas are the source of many of the lies, disinformation, misinformation and worse we see every day.

How to Fix the Mess    

Sure, new privacy legislation that limits how social data can be harvested and exploited, that requires realtime warnings about the accuracy of data and information, that protects algorithmic transparency, reclassifies social media platforms as media companies, and even breaks up the industry are all “good” (though obviously unlikely to happen).  In a decade or two there might be some real impact (it took decades to regulate the tobacco industry).  So legislative regulation would help, so long as it’s insightfully crafted, has real teeth and is assiduously enforced.  All it takes is the patience of Job and a willingness to accept a nibble or two for dinner every night for 5,000 or so nights.

But real leverage will only come from real personal financial and criminal consequences for social media misbehavior.

Fines?

One of the real problems is the money sloshing around the platforms and the business itself.  Sadly, the same observation can be made about lots of business and the shortage of fixes.  For example, why is there a technology oligarchy in the US?  Why is US healthcare the most expensive in the Western world with some of the worst outcomes? Why does medicine cost more in the US than any place in the developed world?  And why do horrific financial crimes go unpunished? We now know more about how social media operates than we ever did.  Yes, money over kids.  But how new is this finding?  Does it not apply to other industries, like the opioid business? So we’re starting in a hole.

Can we fine “bad” companies?  Here’s a list of some of the fines levied on Facebook (just up until 2019), but note that:

“Each individual payout is more or less chump change for a company expected to make more than $69 billion in 2019, a haul for which even the record-breaking $5 billion fine that the Federal Trade Commission levied against the company is barely a dent:  

•  “Facebook agreed to pay $5 million to settle five lawsuits from civil rights and labor organizations.

•  “Turkey’s data protection authority fined Facebook $270,000 for allegedly failing to quickly address a software bug that exposed nonpublic photos belonging to $6.8 million users. 

•  “Italy’s data protection watchdog imposed a $1.1 million fine on Facebook. 

•  “German regulators fined Facebook $2.3 million for allegedly underreporting the number of complaints concerning illegal hate speech on the platform. 

•  “Facebook agreed to pay a $5 billion settlement as part of a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company that was sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. 

•  “The Securities and Exchange Commission also imposed a separate $100 million fine on Facebook for issuing misleading statements in connection to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

•  “Turkey demanded that Facebook pay $280,000 for failing to prevent a data breach that exposed the personal info of 280,959 users in the country. 

•  “A group of advertising agencies announced that Facebook had agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had inflated viewership metrics, which skewed decisions for purchasing ad time on the platform. 

“If Facebook agrees to pay all these fines and settlements, which is far from likely, it would ultimately have to shell out around $5,152,853,047.  That’s roughly 7 percent of its $69 billion in expected earnings for 2019.”

Consequences?  Not much:  Facebook’s/Instagram’s/WhatsApp’s user base has increased.

Personal Liability?

What about personal liability?  Might that have any impact?  Listen to this:

“To shield Mark Zuckerberg from personal liability in a 2019 settlement over the company’s role in a massive privacy breach, Facebook paid $4.9 billion more than an initial fine sought by the Federal Trade Commission, according to shareholder lawsuits first reported by Politico.

“‘Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other Facebook directors agreed to authorize a multi-billion settlement with the FTC as an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the FTC’s complaint, made subject to personal liability, or even required to sit for a deposition,’ the shareholders alleged in one lawsuit.”

If social media executives were held personally liable for transgressions, behavior would change.  Billion-dollar personal settlements would immediately impact behavior.

Criminality? 

If executives were held criminally liable for social media, social media behavior would change overnight.  As Scott Galloway observes, “if you put a few key executives who knowingly lied in front of  Congress … in an orange outfit” that would make a difference.  He’s right, of course, but is that likely to happen?  No.  Because — as you already know — we don’t punish financial criminals or technology oligarchies the way we punish “other” criminals.  But what if we did?

Bottom Line

Unless legislators address the real drivers of change, nothing much will happen, and certainly nothing much will happen fast enough to reorder kids/profit priorities.  Banning lying companies, politicians, lobbyists, PACs (not to mention fake influencers and foreign governments) from social media – if consistently enforced – would help.  Banning insurrectionists would help.  Making social media executives personally liable for transgressions would help a lot.  Jailing some executives for extreme transgressions – like knowingly lying to Congress – would help even more. Follow the money, power and criminality and bring it to the doorstep of the gazillionaires who have the most to lose.  Look there before embarking on a twenty-year dribbling legislative plan to corral social media.