How the Government Could Fix Facebook
Gathered in a Washington, D.C., ballroom last Thursday for their annual “tech prom,” hundreds of tech-industry lobbyists and policy makers applauded politely as announcers read out the names of the event’s sponsors. But the room fell silent when “Facebook” was proclaimed—and the silence was punctuated by scattered boos and groans.
These days, it seems the only bipartisan agreement in Washington is to hate Facebook. Democrats blame the social network for costing them the presidential election. Republicans loathe Silicon Valley billionaires like Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for their liberal leanings. Even many tech executives, boosters, and acolytes can’t hide their disappointment and recriminations.
The tipping point appears to have been the recent revelation that a voter-profiling outfit working with the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, had obtained data on up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. News of the breach came after a difficult year in which, among other things, Facebook admitted that it allowed Russians to buy political ads, advertisers to discriminate by race and age, hate groups to spread vile epithets, and hucksters to promote fake news on its platform.
Over the years, Congress and federal regulators have largely left Facebook to police itself. Now, lawmakers around the world are calling for it Zuckerberg. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated its with the agency. Zuckerberg himself suggested, in a , that perhaps Facebook should be regulated by the government.
