Daniel Hanley of Open Markets Institute published a piece in ProMarket about the actions needed to combat Facebook’s conflicts with hate speech, in addition to ad boycotts from large corporations.

Hundreds of corporations have decided to stop advertising on Facebook to make a statement about Facebook’s inability to combat hate speech on its platform, as part of a pressure campaign led by prominent advocacy organizations such as Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League. 

While this strategy is a necessary part of the steps required to weaken Facebook’s market power, a boycott of Facebook by advertisers has to be paired with other remedies that can fundamentally restructure social media, reduce Facebook’s dominance, and inject fair competition into the industry. 

Facebook occupies a central role in American lives. Almost 70 percent of Americans say that they use the platform in some form, and 74 percent of them visit the site daily. About 68 percent of Americans also obtain at least some of their news from Facebook, with 20 percent saying they often get news there. Facebook also has a 20 percent market share in US digital advertising, second only to Google. In addition to having a $60 billion war chest of cash, Facebook also has more than 1 billion users for four of its services, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Moreover, since the pandemic has confined people to their homes, usage of Facebook has increased considerably—adding to its already compelling value proposition of aggregating more than an hour of attention from its users each day, on average. Since last year, Facebook’s user base has increased by more than 11 percent, and the number of monthly active users has increased by 10 percent. 

With its dominant market power and its role as both social outlet and news provider, Facebook possesses enormous power over the flow of free speech in America. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain went so far as to say that Facebook’s content control could decide an election, and the 2016 election largely proved him right.

Because of the amount of power it has, Facebook cannot escape scrutiny over its decisions to regulate content. Any decision that the corporation makes concerning content regulation is bound to aggravate part of the population. When Facebook takes any step to regulate content, then whichever group is infuriated at the decision will use a prime-time television spot to detail how Facebook’s decisions are unfair or biased. Facebook will then be pressured to modify its policies, and the cycle will start all over again when the corporation makes its next decision regarding content rules.

Read the full article on ProMarket here.