During the recent congressional hearings, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the Senate intelligence committee’s vice chairman, said, “The era of the wild west in social media is coming to an end.” Congress, he said, will have to take action. “Where we go from here is an open question.” More hearings are clearly in the offing, and some kind of regulation is likely to follow. That’s the probable future, but what would happen if the government lost its ability to control the tech industry? What if tech fought back? What if our democracy transformed into a technocracy?

Facebook, Twitter, and Google (FTG)

I’ll use FTG as a proxy for content you can find on the public Internet. During 2018 at three different congressional hearings, FTG was variously accused of “allowing” bad actors to use, and abuse, their platforms.

The proper use of FTG should not have been called into question, because FTG’s business model is putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

The abuse by bad actors who created fake accounts and deployed bots and trolls is a legitimate area of concern, and everyone knows it must be dealt with.

Then there is the concept of Fake News and the tactical reality of censorship. Like pornography, you might know Fake News when you see it, but well-crafted propaganda rarely identifies itself. Whether human, machine, or a hybrid of both, someone or something has to determine what is acceptable and what is not. Whom would you anoint with that level of power?

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

At least some government legislators believe that FTG has the power to accurately predict voter behavior and, more importantly, has the power to alter the course of elections. This is not an unreasonable thought. FTG is capable of high-level predictive modeling and has the ability to test messaging hypotheses quickly and efficiently. Which raises the question, “Could Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Larry Page have swung the outcome of the 2016 presidential election to the candidate of his choice?”

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