Before Facebook, there was Myspace, and before Myspace, there was Friendster, and before Friendster, there was SixDegrees. Some four decades into the internet, and we know the World Wide Web is still too vast a frontier for any Big Tech property to reign omnipotent indefinitely.
Nobody knows this more than Mark Zuckerberg, and that’s why he’s egging on big-government Republicans and Democrats to reform or repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 enshrines free speech as a guiding principle online by protecting websites from being held liable for what its users post. As it stands right now, an individual can tweet something defamatory, and they would be sued, not Twitter. Without it, almost no social media company or even a news site with a comment section would be able to afford the costs of content moderation to let users post. That is, except for Facebook.
With billions of users worldwide and a market cap approaching $800 billion, Facebook knows that between its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, it’s the dominant social media platform, significantly more than Twitter. But that will not last forever, and Zuckerberg knows it, so now is the time for Facebook to ask the government to step in with a wildly onerous and expensive regulation to crowd out any potential competitors. This would also explain why Jack Dorsey, the head of Facebook’s most conspicuous competitor, is opposing the bipartisan push to abolish 230.
In a world without 230, media elites at the New York Times would be fine. They could keep their platforms, while the words of ordinary folks would be relegated to either stringent content moderation or your own blog (and don’t think about using a blogging platform — back to domain-buying we will go!). Meanwhile, Zuckerberg could reap the profits of an internet controlled by almost no one else but himself.
