Regulating social media may prove to be a tricky proposition. To what organization should the responsibility fall, if any? Access Partnership’s Greg Francis unpacks the complexities involved in regulating content on social media platforms.
President Trump’s social media summit at the White House this past July notably didn’t include Facebook or the President’s own favorite social media channel, Twitter. The event was animated by anxiety around an apparent anti-conservative social media bias.
In August a proposed executive order was leaked that would put the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in charge of developing and enforcing new regulations to, in effect, suspend social media companies’ right to curate or suppress content on their platforms. There followed rumblings of a possible mutiny from within these agencies which were coming to the subversive conclusion that being handed this much power over online content — what often amounts to fora for free speech — was unconstitutional (so much for bureaucratic scope creep).
The inside-the-Washington-beltway approach to social media regulation notwithstanding, these false-starts underscore the complexity of managing social media platforms, particularly under an administration bent on getting its hands deep…
