How Biden Can Take the High Road on Misinformation

In his last weeks in office, President Trump has dug in his heels on the annual defense spending bill, promising to veto the legislation over Congress’s refusal to rescind legal protections for internet platforms. As absurd as Trump’s insistence is, it shouldn’t be surprising. Throughout his term, Trump has threatened the platforms through tweets and executive actions, angling for more favorable treatment of the right-wing media and politicians—and undermining efforts to clean up the online information ecosystem in the years since 2016.

While President-elect Biden will certainly take an approach distinct from President Trump’s, it is not yet clear what that will be. “I’ve never been a fan of Facebook,” Biden told the New York Times editorial board during the campaign. Recently, senior Biden campaign staffer Bill Russo harshly criticized Facebook for its handling of posts by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. While this frustration is understandable, Biden should refrain from narrowly focusing on individual grievances. Instead, the better approach is to take a broader, principled view. Biden should look to the idea of a systemic duty of care, which says that the platforms are dependent on their users’ social connections and, thus, are obliged to reduce online harms to those users. Rooted in this theory, he can pressure the platforms to take bolder steps against misinformation.

Trump has not been subtle in his denunciation of social media companies for purported bias against the right. He has claimed repeatedly that technology platforms “totally silence conservatives voices” and that there are “Big attacks on Republicans and Conservatives by Social Media.” Of course, this is not true. An analysis done jointly by Politico and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue suggests that “a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation.” A nine-month analysis from left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters similarly found no evidence of conservative censorship.

But Trump is not completely wrong. He and his supporters are receiving different treatment—because they are responsible for an overwhelmingly disproportionate share of online misinformation. An academic study of more than 1 million articles suggested that Trump himself was the “largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation ‘infodemic.’” A working paper from the Berkman Klein Center similarly found that Trump was especially responsible for spreading disinformation about mail-in voter fraud. Similar research also argues that the right-wing media is increasingly more isolated from journalistic standards and facts. This stream of misinformation has led to modest interventions by platforms, including Twitter’s lukewarm “disputed” label tagging claims about election fraud and Facebook’s takedown of pages for several groups dedicated to election disinformation (though many more groups remain).

Trump has responded by denouncing the platforms’ modest interventions as evidence of further bias. In addition to his tweets, he signed an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” and instructed the Federal Communications Commission to clarify federal protections for social media companies. These actions may have influenced the platforms’ decision-making, though the economic incentives of allowing high-engagement political content also play a role. For instance, in late 2017, Facebook executives considered, but then rejected, algorithmic changes that would have reduced the spread of hyperpartisan junk news websites like the Daily Wire—instead tweaking the algorithm in a manner that harmed traffic to websites like Mother Jones, a progressive media site that also produces traditional journalistic work. This fits into an apparent pattern of behavior in which Facebook avoids interfering with right-wing content that breaks the platform’s stated rules, even over the protests of its own employees.

Clearly, Trump has pursued this strategy for political reasons. But his suggestions of how the platforms should behave roughly map on to a new theory of internet speech regulation called the online fairness doctrine, proposed most prominently by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. This concept iswould be an adaptation of the original fairness doctrine, which from 1949 to 1987 required broadcasters to devote airtime to opposing views on controversial issues of public importance. In Hawley’s proposal, online platforms would lose legal liability protections unless they were certified by the Federal Trade Commission as politically neutral. As my colleague John Villasenor has Become a supporter of IT Security News and help us remove the ads.