Date: 10/22/2020
Author: Mr. X
Both Parties Want To Regulate Big Tech. Neither Will Act.
It’s rare to see bipartisanship in Washington these days. But both Republicans and Democrats are pledging to regulate Big Tech companies. They even agree on the specifics – removing or changing Section 230 from the Communications Decency Act. This could potentially classify social media companies as publishers rather than platforms and make them vulnerable to lawsuits.
This should be straightforward. On Wednesday, Republican Senator Josh Hawley called for government regulation of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech companies. The Missouri senator has also introduced a bill that would strip Section 230 protection from social media companies “that display manipulative, behavioral ads or provide data to be used for them.” In this, he has a supposed ally – Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has called for “immediately” revoking Section 230 protections. President Donald Trump wants the same thing, a declaration he rather ironically tweeted out.
Yet though Democrats and Republicans may give the same reasons why they want to regulate the industry, their motivations are different. That difference will be what counts.
Republicans – especially President Trump – have long complained about supposed double standards when it comes to free speech online. The social media environment that arguably enabled President Trump to be elected no longer exists. Google employees were stunned at the president’s 2016 victory.
A leaked video from inside the company showed that there are good reasons to suspect search results have been manipulated to the Republicans’ disadvantage in the years since. Reddit banned the largest pro-Trump Subreddit. Twitter has labeled some of the president’s tweets as inaccurate. Facebook has banned a pro-Trump super PAC from advertising on the platform. In the most sensational case yet, Twitter locked The New York Post’s account after the newspaper published a story on the alleged misdeeds of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
Despite all this, Republicans have mostly limited themselves to griping on the very platforms they claim are censoring them. The Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Chairman Lindsey Graham, was poised to subpoena Facebook and Twitter officials less than a week ago. However, Senate Republicans lacked the resolution to follow through, limiting themselves to negotiations about “voluntary” testimony. The Senate Judiciary Committee finally did vote to subpoena Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai… but Democrats boycotted the vote. Of course, it is highly likely that Republicans will not have a majority in the Senate after Election Day and so their bluster has little significance. There may not even be a hearing before the election.
Why are the Republicans so timid? There are three major reasons.
- First, until very recently, Facebook, Twitter, and Google engaged with grassroots conservatives. Google was a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018. Though most Big Tech employees donate to Democrats, the PACs from Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft donate to Republicans almost equally as they do to Democrats.
- Second, the conservative movement itself, grounded in “free market principles” and opposed to “big government,” is deeply uncomfortable with state regulation. Many conservative and libertarian think tanks, publications, and lobbying groups would oppose any large-scale effort to regulate private companies.
- Third, conservative politicians have an excuse for inaction because these companies do have competitors, albeit ones with little power. For instance, many conservatives and Trump supporters have rallied to Twitter competitor Parler. Though Parler is mostly a conservative echo chamber, it allows Republicans to leave everything to “the free market.”
Democrats are driven by entirely different motivations than Republicans. They want to see more scrutiny of content, not less.
Potential vice president and current California Senator Kamala Harris has been especially vocal about this. In September 2018, she interrogated Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg about whether content that generated user engagement was also “inflammatory and hateful.”
In May 2019, Kamala Harris said social media companies would be held accountable “for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” A few months later, she said that there should be a common standard for Facebook and Twitter and called for President Trump to lose his account.
Yet Silicon Valley is not afraid of Kamala Harris. Quite the opposite. When the senator was selected as Joe Biden’s potential vice-president, The New York Times reported that the tech industry had been bankrolling her career since she was California’s attorney general. CNN said “Silicon Valley can breathe a little easier, at least for now,” after she became the VP nominee.
Unlike Senator Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris has not championed breaking up tech companies. Instead, one venture capitalist speculated that she would be a “quiet ally” to the sector. “Silicon Valley Sees Kamala Harris as One of Its Own,” reported The Wall Street Journal. Vox proclaimed she was “the choice Joe Biden needed to win over Silicon Valley.”
The Biden campaign, and possible transition team, has several people from Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. Amazon’s public policy and communications chief Jay Carney spoke at a “virtual policy roundtable” at the Democratic National Convention. Wired recently found that 95 percent of political donors from Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook gave to Mr. Biden, not President Trump. And the former vice president did not call for breaking up these firms in the Democratic primary, even when he was facing a fierce progressive challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders.
Those who do want to break up Big Tech firms – those on the populist Right and those on the progressive Left – are unlikely to make common cause. For example, The Department of Justice recently filed a lawsuit against Google. The DOJ claims Google is “the monopoly gatekeeper to the internet for billions of users and countless advertisers worldwide.” However, no Democratic Attorneys General in the states have joined the federal lawsuit.
In the event of a victory for Joe Biden, it’s impossible to imagine Attorney General William Barr remaining anywhere close to political power. It’s true that the Democratic-led House of Representatives recently presented a scathing report which accused Google of stifling competition.
However, just a few weeks earlier, congressional Democrats said Facebook had “intentionally” amplified “divisive and conspiratorial content.” The question would be whether Democrats in both the White House and Congress would concentrate on breaking up Big Tech companies or preventing extremist content.
It seems likely that the latter will be the priority. Mr. Biden and Senator Harris are, by present standards, moderates within their party who do not share the openly socialist beliefs of those like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both have called for more scrutiny of online speech, which can hardly be achieved if the main platforms are taken apart.
Working with Google (which owns YouTube) to steer Americans away from undesirable content also requires accepting its market dominance. Thus, though there might be some reforms, a Biden presidency would not become known for trust-busting. Indeed, much of what these companies are doing might be interpreted as a way of winning over the incoming Administration.
If President Trump repeats 2016 and proves the polls wrong, things may be different. The lawsuit will go forward and the president will have Senate allies that will support his push to repeal Section 230 altogether. Furthermore, if the president does pull off an upset, progressives will probably interpret it as a repudiation of the Democrats’ moderate wing. Economic populism will become an even stronger force within the party.
In theory, that means populists in both parties would have cause for common ground. In practice, angry progressives would not want to work with the Trump Administration, especially if the incumbent had lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.
President Trump is an underdog right now. If he is to win, the polls need to be off on a scale far larger than four years ago. Nothing is impossible in politics and I’ll venture no prediction about who will win. But I can make one guarantee – there will be no regulation of Big Tech unless the “extreme” wings of both parties unite. And at least in the short-term, that seems less likely than waking up on November 4 to discover the next president is a Libertarian. As long as both parties hate each other more than Big Tech, investors have little to fear.
