Regulate Facebook
Congress must treat 21st century monopolies with appropriate skepticism.
The late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina maintained such a skill at constituent services, so the political legend goes, that the voters of South Carolina came to anticipate a personal phone call from the senator on their birthdays. But Ted Cruz has ’ol Strom beat. Our junior senator doesn’t just know your birthday. He probably also knows your favorite movies and television shows, your closest friends, where you went on your last vacation, who you dated in college and whether or not it was ever “complicated.”
That’s because when Cruz ran for president in 2016 he paid $5.8 million for Cambridge Analytica to scrape hyper-specific information from Facebook users to help target individual voters.
The British political consulting company, which is owned in part by right-wing, big-money donor Robert Mercer, is now at the center of a scandal after the firm was caught improperly harvesting information from 50 million users. Questions remain about whether that information was used in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica has also made headlines for its questionable relations with Russia and CEO Alexander Nix bragging about bribing and blackmailing politicians.
Facebook has responded by suspending Cambridge Analytica as a third-party client and tried to end their story there, essentially shrugging its shoulders and saying that trading in personal information isn’t a bug — its the business model.
But this isn’t the first time Facebook has landed in trouble for allowing users’ privacy to be violated. In 2011, the company was caught deceiving people about the extent to which their personal information was be shared and eventually signed an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission promising to make changes.
It is now clear that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get the iMessage.
The Facebook CEO has been asked to testify before Congress and the FTC is reupping its investigation into the social media company.
The next step should involve Congress passing a law, similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, that makes companies financially liable when they’re negligent in the protection of private data. Whether Facebook, Equifax or Target, corporations must be held to a higher standard when handling our personal information. But it can’t end there. The bigger question is how growing data empires treat not only their users and consumers, but also producers. Facebook and Google alike harness their massive collection of people’s private information to control markets and dominate publishers, artists and advertising companies. Together the social media network and search engine controlled 63 percent of online ad spending last year. The technology may be new, but the problem is fundamental — first movers in an industry grow big, buy up or quash competitors and become a monopoly.
When that happened with AT&T, the government regulated the telecom like a utility and then divided it into Baby Bells. Standard Oil, as well, was broken up into smaller competitors.
The Open Markets Institute has recommended a nine-point plan for Facebook that involves spinning off its ad network, rolling back the purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram, and holding the company to the same transparency standard as television and radio for political advertisements.
The ongoing scandal about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is about more than the 2016 election. It’s about whether Congress upholds its responsibility to protect our economy from dangerous domination.
Because it doesn’t really matter whether our representatives remember birthdays. It matters whether they’re looking out for our best interests — and that means crafting appropriate regulation for 21st century industries.
The ongoing scandal about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is about more than the 2016 election.