Reporter Karina Montoya pinpoints antitrust, data privacy, and platform transparency as essential to rein in internet giants.

Americans share the view that something is seriously wrong with the way big technology platforms intermediate social communications. By 2021, 8 in 10 Americans believed that large social media platforms helped spread disinformation more than reliable news. The amplification of online disinformation — a catchall term used here to refer to false or misleading material used to influence behavior — has indeed become a monumental problem. The spread of the “Big Lie,” the unsubstantiated claim that President Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner in the 2020 presidential elections, has come to represent the extreme nature of this problem.

More specific concerns vary across political aisles. Conservatives call out “fake news” and decry censorship of their views on social media, so many want to strip these platforms of their power to moderate content. For many on the right, the solution is to substantially reform or repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which allows platforms to curate content while protecting them from liability over the vast majority of the speech they host. Liberals see outright lies being propagated over social media and believe platforms are not doing enough to remove them, so they defend the ability of platforms to develop content moderation tools like fact-checking and labeling, the suspension or removal of accounts, and the exercise of more oversight of political ads.

Fortunately, a way exists to address these concerns while also helping to deal with many other problems with today’s informational environment. But to get there we need to broaden the conversation and consider how a combination of three different policy levers can be used to that end. Specifically, we need to look at how a combination of competition policy, data privacy rights, and transparency requirements for platforms can be made to work together toward meaningful reform. By prioritizing efforts on these three fronts, we can not only go a long way toward solving the problems of disinformation, which peaks in election seasons, but also ameliorate other dangerous knock-on effects threatening democracy, such as the eroding economic foundations of independent journalism.

These policy fronts also present an opportunity to tackle how Big Tech’s operations exacerbate harm to communities of color and other vulnerable groups, such as non-English speaking people. The lack of antitrust enforcement, data privacy protections, and platform transparency obligations in the United States affects these communities in multiple ways: as entrepreneurs, they are virtually unable to challenge technology incumbents on a level playing field; as consumers, they are exposed to harms such as unlawful discrimination in digital advertising; and as voters, they are targeted with disinformation and manipulation by politicians and campaigns. 

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