Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, circulated draft legislation last week aimed at shoring up rules enforcement at social media companies to prevent hate speech and privacy violations. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Molly Boigon: Why do you think it’s so hard to set ground rules for social-media companies? Jan Schakowsky: Early on, we wanted to encourage entrepreneurship and we wanted to encourage the development of the whole sector, and so social media companies were set free from liability in many ways. But now we are finding that consumers are feeling anxious about the Internet—whether or not they are in control of their own information, is this going to be a place where violence can be stoked, where extremism has a home. We want in the legislation that we’ve just sent out as a discussion draft by staff to make sure that the social media platforms and the online marketplaces establish, maintain and make public written terms of service. It’s really a pretty modest idea that any failure to do that would result in what we would call in an unfair and deceptive practice. Boigon: Is the issue in your mind that the written terms of service are not sufficiently strict, or that they’re not enforced? Schakowsky: Certainly that they’re not enforced. Most social media companies, I think, have terms of service that, if they were enforced, would certainly improve the environment on the internet. I think that’s an interesting question on whether or not a final bill ought to have some minimum requirements, but right now, in the draft that we have sent out, we have really talked about establishing, maintaining and making public as opposed to evaluating those terms of service. Boigon: Can you talk a little bit more about why hate speech is an issue of consumer protection? Schakowsky: We want to empower these regulatory agencies—while in this case it's the Federal Trade Commission, I’m also interested in the Consumer Product Safety Commission for example—to clarify their authority to act on these issues of extremism and product safety. We know, and the FBI says, that QAnon actually is engaged in terrorism as a continuing terrorist threat, so this is real. This is not an abstract idea. It can cause real harm. Plus, we have found a situation where the platforms do not take account of products that are brought into this country or made in this country that are dangerous. We want to set some parameters here so that they can’t hide behind a liability shield. Boigon: What would you say to people who think this type of legislation would be an infringement upon free speech? Schakowsky: There’s been a lot of complaints from both sides. A major ranking Republican member on my subcommittee said that the real problem is that there’s suppression of speech from the right, and people on the left have said that too. But I think there are some very clear lines that are not going to be hard to draw. There are some very clear cases. Boigon: What does accountability look like? Schakowsky: There can be fines. Facebook woke up a little bit from the $5 billion fine that they got [for violating consumer privacy]. Whatever the enforcement mechanisms are, they have to be meaningful to these companies that are so big and making so much money and focusing far less on consumer protection than on profit protection. |