The Slippery Slope of Regulating Social Media

An excerpt of an article by Peter Suderman

(From Nytimes.com; published on 18 September 2018)

The promise of the internet, and social media in particular, was that it would not only allow anyone the
opportunity to speak, but would also make it possible for anyone to precisely tailor what he reads, sees
and hears online. News and information would no longer be mediated by newspaper editors, television
producers and other gatekeepers. Instead, social media would allow direct access to individual voices in
a feed custom-built by the user. It was a new frontier for both unregulated free expression and individual
control.

In practice, the actual experience of social media, for many users, is not one of control but of virtual
bombardment, in which a flood of ideas and opinions that are irritating, dull and often outright offensive
often seem impossible to avoid. Yes, you can block, mute, unfollow, log off and even delete your account.
But the prevalence of social media — the way in which it has become the mortar of everyday life, filling
in the cracks of our time — has a way of enforcing a sense that there is no way to truly escape from its
reach. The world of social media increasingly feels as if it is simply the world.

That world is one in which speech is often perceived not as an individual right, but as a public act, in which
words and ideas are not your own, but a contribution to the collective. Social media has, in effect,
socialized speech.

So it’s no surprise that the rise of social media has coincided with calls for restrictions on speech, both
online and off, from narrow campaigns to strip Steve Bannon of speaking gigs or get sites to evict alt-right
trolls and provocateurs like Alex Jones — who was banned permanently last week by Twitter — and Steve
Bannon to more broad-based pushes to regulate big tech platforms at the federal level. The omnipresence
of social media has increased demand for limitations on speech.

The feeling of inescapability is amplified by both our politics and our traditional media. Walk into any
modern newsroom and you’ll see screen after screen open to Twitter and Facebook. Log onto Twitter on
any given weeknight and you can see exactly what journalists are doing with their spare time. Twitter has
become an always-on, all-encompassing chat room for political reporters and commentators and the
people who follow the news most obsessively.

The sense that social media and the rest of reality have converged is further intensified by President
Trump, who spends a lot of time tweeting, which then, of course, causes a feedback loop with the media,
which reports on and discusses his tweets, which sometimes lead to additional mini-controversies of their
own, and so on and so forth, meaning that a significant fraction of mainstream political journalism consists
of reporting and commentary about what people are saying online. Turn on cable news at any given hour
of the day, and the odds are reasonably high that you’ll encounter a summary of or argument about what’s
happening on social media. It’s Twitter all the way down.

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Even for those who aren’t news junkies, the connective power of social media, combined with its habit-
forming drips of information and positive reinforcement — all those likes and favorites — can be difficult
to avoid entirely, unless you want to become a digital hermit. Yet as anyone who has spent time on social
media knows, even feeds built to serve up nothing but pictures of puppies and babies can easily devolve
into ugly political arguments.

Social media companies appear to be aware of their growing hold on America’s social and political
consciousness, and the likely consequences. “People do see us as a digital public square,” Jack Dorsey,
Twitter’s chief executive, recently told members of Congress, “and that comes with certain expectations.”
Speaking to senators on the same day, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, seemed to
accept that some form of federal oversight was inevitable, saying, “We don’t think it’s a question of
whether regulation, we think it’s a question of the right regulation.”

The embrace of regulation is no doubt strategic — an effort to ensure that Facebook can weather any
new rules better than potential competitors. Yet even these social media behemoths now appear to view
themselves as something like public utilities. The Trump administration, in turn, seems to share that view:
Last week, the Justice Department proposed talks with state attorneys general about the practices of large
tech platforms.

Given the unanticipated reach and influence of these companies, this view is perhaps understandable.
But it is mistaken and even dangerous, because at its core it is a view that speech — the primary use for
these platforms — is not an individual right, but a collective good that should be subject to political
control.

Source:

Suderman, P. (2018, September 18). The slippery slope of regulating social media. Nytimes.Com. Retrieved

October 2, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/opinion/the-slippery-slope-of-

regulating-social-media.html

This material belongs to Universitas Prasetiya Mulya

Do not upload or share this material to public domain. For private use only!