Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has called for the global regulation of social media companies. Given his lack of enthusiasm for attending government committees on these subjects, scepticism over the strength of his conversion is warranted. Mr Zuckerberg’s support is welcome but does not go far enough. The Big Tech platform companies must do more than take implicit responsibility for the content they host. Mr Zuckerberg and others should be pushed to follow through with meaningful changes.
Mr Zuckerberg’s weekend blog post and op-ed, Four Ideas to Regulate the Internet, at least acknowledged that social media has become a vehicle for political interference. This is a volte-face from his position shortly after the 2016 US presidential election. Some of his suggestions — such as creating an independent third-party body to set standards on what counts as harmful content — are useful. As Mr Zuckerberg himself acknowledges, there are serious risks when social media companies are the arbiters of acceptability. This is heightened when each company has separate, often opaque, standards.
Yet the Facebook boss gives few details on exactly how such controls would be implemented. He merely declares that companies “should be accountable for enforcing standards on harmful content”. Both Facebook and YouTube struggled to impose their own standards around harmful content as videos of the Christchurch shooting proliferated online last month. It is hard to see why external standards would be more effective without additional coercion.