Is Facebook Having a Big Tobacco Moment?
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In whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg it seems have met an unstoppable force to counter the immovable object the social media behemoth has become. But what that means and how quickly or not federal lawmakers implement severe regulations or break up the company is murky.
The New York Times: “Facebook and Big Tech are facing a Big Tobacco moment,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said this week when a whistle-blower testified about how the social media company’s products harmed teenagers.
“I think that that’s an appropriate analogy,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, added later.
The whistle-blower’s testimony, and the thousands of internal documents she shared with lawmakers, generated unusual bipartisan bonhomie in a divided Washington. Senators said it was time for Congress to coalesce around new regulations to rein in the company and perhaps the technology industry as a whole.
But if what faces Big Tech is anything like what happened to Big Tobacco — a reckoning over the industry’s harms to society, and children in particular — what lies ahead is likely to be a yearslong, complicated path toward new rules and regulations, with no guaranteed result.
Lawmakers have proposed creating a new federal agency dedicated to oversight of the tech companies, or expanding the power of the Federal Trade Commission. They have pushed stronger laws for child privacy and security and to regulate the behavioral advertising business models of Facebook and Google. And a handful of bills to overhaul antitrust laws, with an eye toward making the public less reliant on a small number of tech companies, have progressed out of a House committee.
But passing any one of those options is a steep climb. Tech companies are swimming in riches and use them to sway lawmakers, building the largest lobbyist army of any industry in Washington. Dozens of privacy and speech bills have stalled in Congress in recent years.
