Last week, in the space of just a few seconds, the White House press secretary cut the knees out from beneath everyone who has spent the last five years arguing that the shortcomings of Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media enterprises will be best addressed by the free market. “We are in regular touch with social-media platforms,” Psaki said, before confirming that the executive branch was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Unbidden, she then volunteered the coup de grâce: “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there.”
A longstanding response to critics of Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms has been, “if you don’t like them, go build your own.” Of late, this injunction has been hijacked by its targets and turned into a cynical and sardonic scoff, but, despite this appropriation, it has remained the best among the available options. However imperfect and infuriating markets can be, they still represent our best chance to extract ourselves from this mess, not least because the likely result of regulation will not be to weaken the Twitters and Facebooks of the world but to ossify their positions and thereby ensure that they will stick around forever. Despite the overheated rhetoric that one hears from their detractors, none of our major social-media companies are in fact “monopolies,” “utilities,” “common carriers,” or “public fora.” They are standard private companies that operate within a competitive private market and that are subject to the same private pressures as any other outfit. It can be easy to forget, but, in the space of just 20 years, we have gone seamlessly from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. There is no good reason to assume that this is the endpoint of that evolution, or to believe that the benefits of government oversight will outweigh the flaws.
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