The latest charade of bringing Jack and Zuck in front of Congress to yell at them reminds me that our elected officials and regulators don’t have a plan for how to properly regulate social media. Jack and Zuck probably do have a plan and if they play their cards correctly, they will be able to use regulations to lock in their dominance for many many years to come. That should scare us all.
So what would a good plan look like?
My partner Albert laid it out plainly and simply in this post a while back and I thought I would recirculate it.
Give a Section 230 like protection to companies in return for providing a complete set of enduser APIs. In other words, require Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. to be fully programmable in order to have their liability limited.
https://continuations.com/post/619477235088457728/the-social-media-triangle
It is really simple. Allow third parties to build interfaces on top of these networks if they want to maintain section 230 protection. Those new interfaces will allow massive user choice in terms of algorithms, curation, moderation, and more.
We need 21st century forms of regulation for 21st century problems. And we are not seeing much of that from our regulators right now, sadly.
