The Social Media Fairness Trap

Social media is a problem. It really is and I’m not contesting that. I also understand that it’s not just a simple matter of “well it’s a private company.” This is in large part because of massive subsidizing, beneficial (to the big guys) market regulations, Intellectual Property laws, and so on. It’s not really a private company because the market is not a level playing field. The market is very skewed and there’s a lot of politics in play. So I get that it’s not a simple solution of “it’s a private business, they can do what they want.”

Before we can really think about possible solutions, we need to understand what kind of problem we’re dealing with. If you are familiar with the colorful world of conservative social media you’ll certainly hear that this is a First Amendment problem. But is it really?

Yes and no. 

Now, I’m not really a Constitutionalist (though I respect it) but I do have a great degree of appreciation for the First Amendment. 

The First Amendment protects free speech. It also protects us from being required to speak or being required to legally associate with others. 

As much as I disagree with the politics of Twitter and Facebook, and no matter other secondary issues surrounding this question (like tax subsidies for Big Tech and so on), their right to censor their own platform and their right to dissociate with people they deem undesirable is a genuine First Amendment issue. Private companies self regulating, even in a way I don’t like, is not a First Amendment issue. They may be biased, inconsistent, and maybe even violating their own terms of service, but it’s not a First Amendment issue. However, the government deciding that private companies can’t regulate the usage of their product is absolutely a First Amendment issue. 

This is the same principle behind not being forced to bake a LGBT wedding cake. It’s the same principle behind Christian colleges having moral standards for admission and employment. There’s differences, of course, but it’s the same core idea. In other words, tread carefully. This one really matters.

This entire debate is complicated by convoluted legal distinctions that are even further complicated by Big Tech being given government handouts. They have a massive leg up against any competition so I propose we get rid of what’s keeping competition down. Right now there’s competition, but believe it or not, local governments aren’t handing out multimillion dollar facilities to Gab and MeWe quite as often as they are to Facebook and Amazon. And, sadly, this competition isn’t very serious. At least not yet. It’s all user-facing and very little infrastructure, the apps are mediocre at best, and there’s no genuine innovation. With respect to their efforts, these products are cheap knockoffs.

We need a market solution, not a cancerous solution that opens the floodgates to even bigger problems. And that market solution is being hampered by the government, not helped.

And yet many are suggesting just that. A “fix” that will only add yet another layer of statist regulations to the social media market (and probably the entire telecommunications market). It’s fighting fire with gasoline.

Here’s the deal, friends. This never works. This government solution is how we created the problem. This “solution” is how we create all sorts of market problems whether the market in question is telecommunications, health care, education, or so on. Government intervention into the market creates unfair advantages and regulatory problems, and those problems are “fixed” by creating another layer of regulations, and then those regulations create more problems and so on and so on. 

I get the desire to limit the harm that left-owned social media platforms can cause by stifling political speech. I really do. But this is not a new economic conundrum. Our nation has gone through similar “problems” with the railroad industry, American steel, oil, car manufacturers, and more. These industries were seemingly too powerful, so the government stepped in. The interventions to “help” the market and to bring “fairness” to the market didn’t help in the long run. These interventions almost always help the large companies even more. Too often these regulation bills were literally written by the lawyers of the companies they were intended to regulate. It will never be a real, organic, market based competition. 

A real “fix” for the Twitter/Facebook problem (and I do think it’s a problem) is to abolish intellectual property (or at least dramatically reform IP law), quit subsidizing these companies, deregulate the telecommunications market, and level the playing field. Don’t just give lip service to competition, but lower the market barrier of entry so that real competition can develop. 

The fix isn’t to slap an additional regulation on the social media market. It’s tempting because that “fix” (which isn’t really a fix at all) is far more likely to happen than fixing the problems that actually created the current situation. 

Though I, again, admit there’s a problem, the statist solution will absolutely be worse than the problem. As much as I don’t like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey having the reins of mass public influence (that they surely do hold) I also don’t think giving those reins over to Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or any of their goons is a wise idea. We should think very carefully about what form this state solution could take.

I reckon it’ll look like more internet regulations, boards of bureaucrats judging whether or not platforms are being politically fair, and still unlikely to have competition that is both ethically sound and technically sound. Are we to support a “Social Media Fairness Bill” or a “Social Media Fairness Committee”? I’m sure whatever they come up with have a wonderfully innocent name (who’s opposed to fairness, right?), but do we trust them any more than we trust Zuck, Dorsey, Bezos and the other technocrats? I don’t want to live in a dystopian cyberpunk future where Bezos is our cybergod, but I’ll pass on the ol’ fashioned Washington DC tyranny too.

As far as social media censorship goes, I think things will get worse before it gets better. However, things can get a lot worse if we crawl to Caesar in DC and ask him to to “pretty please take more power”. No matter how good that solution may seem now, it’ll come back to haunt us. Don’t take the cheese. It’s a trap.