Lawrence Lessig: Anti-Trust Laws Can Fix Social Media Bias

We're dealing with this very unique landscape now of Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these different social media groups that have a vested interest in a specific narrative being portrayed and one thing specifically is and this is being addressed right now in Congress is the discrimination against conservative voices and And There's a lot of denial of that But there's also a lot of evidence that that is the case and that they feel like they have some moral or ethical obligation to suppress certain conservative voices for whatever reason and push the narrative of Progressive and liberal voices. This is a very strange thing because the the amount of influence that something like Google or Facebook has today is arguably as great or greater than that the Sean Hannity's of the world and the CNN's and the Traditional news outlets. Yeah, so no doubt me, you know, there's a big debate about whether they were more important in 2016 then The cable stations my colleague Gil Heidman Claire has a book that argues pretty powerfully I think that it was actually the cable stations that were more Responsible for the result than the Facebook's but whether in 2016 they were the more powerful someday in the future They're gonna be more powerful. It's certainly powerful. Absolutely and you know The question is what we mean by Bias or discrimination here like, you know in 2017 in the fall. It was revealed that Facebook Was selling ads For people who wanted to target quote Jew haters Okay, so you could go and you could buy ads for Jew haters now there was never how did that work? Okay, I mean, you know They have lots of categories you get to pick when you buy Facebook ads, you know Liberals or people who voted people over 60 whatever this was one of the categories that was exposed you could buy ads for Jew haters There was an actual choice. Yeah. Yeah what? Yeah now There was never a time that a Facebook engineer or marketing person decided we ought to create a Jew hater category That was not a decision of any human It was the product of the machine the AI that was developing the categories based on what they saw people happen to be interested in And then throw up categories to see what sticks and then certain categories stick and then they run with them So so you might say, you know, if you were the you know, if he defamation league you would say oh my god Facebook is you know discriminating to Encourage Jew haters, but from another perspective you like the The machine's doing it no doubt. Yeah, but but to what extent you want to say Facebook is doing it And I think that's off that's often what you're gonna see in this argument about whether they're quote biasing the system against one side or the other, you know, like this hilarious Hearing that was just held on Capitol Hill two days ago. Yes where Great Congress and lose like if you don't want negative Results in the search then don't do bad things And so, you know, I think this is not quite fun. It was really funny It this is like nobody's intent we should explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about yeah, so so there was an argument about you know, whether Google was tilting the ads to embarrass one side or the other and I Guess it it was a congressman from Iowa. Everybody think that that's the guy who didn't know that Google didn't make the iPhone Yeah, he got really embarrassed. But anyway, there was this you know The exchange was basically here. I'm gonna show you a demonstration and they put in a certain name and that's yeah Congressman Smith and then up comes this or reference to his race baiting. Yeah, and he's like outraged by this And you know, so one theory is you've got Google engineers down there saying let's get congressman Smith So we're gonna make it so every time you put Smith in there up comes race baiting, but Google's responses look We don't do individualized search results like we give people what we think people want based on what they've done in the past and What they've shown interest in and and so that's what's producing this It's the machine that's producing this result and that let Congress and Lou come back with you know if you don't like the Connections then just don't enable them to be made by don't doing things like don't do things like race baiting Yeah, if you don't want negative search results don't do negative things. Yeah, yeah, which is a pretty but but I do think that It there's a really hard problem here When you say it's the machine is doing it, you know What's the future gonna be like when we can just say it's not my promise the machine this is just Facebook though When when you're talking about or Google rather when you're talking about Twitter Twitter has a different issue and their issue is There's accusations of shadow banning that they have decided that they're going to silence certain voices or make them much more difficult to find Or eliminate them from certain people's feeds, you know, and they're doing this This the allegation that they're doing this based on their own personal preferences their their beliefs that they you know, their progressive ideology Wants them to lean left and just somehow or another Distribute that information in a much more left-leaning way. Yeah, and I Hear these and I don't not an expert on what they're doing And I wouldn't be surprised if you know certain complaints come in about certain feeds and they say we're gonna take these That's the allegation. They haven't denied that And you know quite frankly some of these like feeds, you know, Alex Jones stuff you know if you're the consequence of your News show is that somebody takes a gun to a pizza shop in Chicago in in Washington to try to prove that Hillary Clinton is running a sex slave operation in the basement There's something wrong with what's going on there child sex child sex. Right? Yeah So I understand why they feel like they're Responsible there and you know was recognized from the very beginning these companies have said we're gonna try to create a certain kind of environment Like so Facebook required you identify yourself so that under the shadows of anonymity You wouldn't be causing lot wreaking lots of havoc inside the system But look, I think the more fundamental problem here, you know So what I've said so far people like Google and Facebook might like here's stuff. They're gonna hate the more fundamental problem here is That we have no antitrust enforcement of any of these companies against any of these companies and we've allowed them to become so incredibly powerful Without any justification under the law Well, isn't the issue though that this was never anticipated that this is not like when they created Twitter They didn't think of it. It's gonna be there. It's gonna be some voice of distribution of information that's unprecedented worldwide But that's what it is. Yeah No, they didn't expect no doubt they didn't expect it to work exactly the way it worked But the antitrust law has from the beginning had standards that should have said we need to step in in certain places So for example in 2010 Facebook is facing a pretty powerful competitive threat from Instagram and The question is what they're gonna do like it's cooler to be Instagram. It's Kids are using it much of the growth rate is much faster In an ordinary competitive market what they would do is they would build a better product to compete with Instagram their response was to write a check for a billion dollars and they bought Instagram and And they've bought a whole bunch of other companies including whatsapp which you know was a very important competitor in people believed a really secure way to communicate didn't they buy Boston Dynamics to have they that's amazing There's a Wikipedia page that has like endless list of companies that they've yeah, they're buying robots. Yeah, that makes sense Is that just find out that's true? Yeah But the point is Antitrust law in any of these moments should have and historically would have stepped in and said wait a minute Wait a minute. You can't buy your way into complete dominance of these markets And I think one of the biggest changes that's happened in the last 20 years is that the antitrust Department has just shut up its doors and just stopped doing its work. So if we had a more competitive internet environment where Companies had to compete against each other You'd have companies that try to compete by protecting your privacy differently by refusing to sell your information differently You'd have lots of pressure on companies like Facebook to behave not because idiot senators who don't know how Facebook works or calling them before hearings But because the market itself is creating the competition that drives them to behave in a way that actually conforms with what consumers want So I agree with you These are real questions and important questions to figure out are they biasing in one way or the other and if they're biasing Systematically, that's a really important problem But the solution to that problem might not be more government regulation The solution to that problem might be governments making sure we have the right kind of competition going on here So that they can't get away with behaving in this bad way