Op-ed: Facebooks moral failure shows the need for competition and is a test for Congress
Summary
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a remote video hearing held by subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on "Social Medias Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation" in Washington, March 25, 2021. As Sarah Frier wrote in "No Filter," Instagrams founders opposed adding a re-share button because it would give it "less power to demonstrate model behavior; everyone would just be focused on going viral." Less than a year later, Instagrams cofounders reportedly left the company after Facebook refused to provide it with adequate resources to safeguard users health and safety on the platform. Finally, as the Facebook outage from last week made clear, the company operates as essential communication infrastructure for billions of people, underscoring the massive scope of this problem. These bills would prevent the types of mergers that resulted in Facebook cornering the market and killing competitors, as well as create new rules of the road for the digital economy to ensure that there is an even playing field for the next generation of startups and other businesses.
