Some have sought to blame the tech giants for their part in the riots at Capitol Hill. However, it is good to see two different articles cautioning against knee jerk reactions like the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Both articles (in the BBC and FT) refer to a study published by Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. The study summarised its findings as follows:
Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to
disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation. The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.
Thus, the bigger problem seems to be (apart from Trump and others responsible for the disinformation campaign) misinformation spread by some media sources. The study further found that found that social media activity around the subject surged when mainstream news reports carried speeches about it by Trump. Further, as John Thornhill at the Financial Times reports, most of the insurgents who stormed Capitol Hill had already moved off the big tech giants like Facebook and Twitter and to more niche platforms.
In any case, both Twitter and Facebook have locked Trump out of his accounts on their platforms. This might have the effect of Trump’s supporters calling for regulation of the social media giants to add to calls from the other side of the political spectrum for social media regulation. In this context of increased calls for regulation, it is worth emphasising another point Thornhill makes. He cautions that repealing section 230 would only reinforce the dominance of Facebook and Twitter because the responsibility of checking information would be too much of a burden on new challenger companies. (This is an argument Leonid Sirota and I had made here in 2019.)
While all these media platforms including Facebook and Twitter were certainly weaponised by Trump, it is interesting to note that misinformation is not a new social media era invention. In a recent book, Profit and Prejudice – The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Paul Donovan writes that a pamphlet was used (in 1848) to spread misinformation about Jewish banker, Nathan Rothschild apparently profiting from the Battle of Waterloo by manipulating the London financial markets. As Donovan says, “it was “fake news” in a world without Twitter” (at page 7). Rather than hasty regulatory reform, it is a good time for civil society to realise the importance of being vigilant about news sources, be responsible about what they share, and try to diversify the sources of news consumption.