Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problem | Vox

Final paragraphs from an Ezra Klein reality check

"The question isn’t how to unleash competition in social media. The question is how to control it. Hughes offers a quick and, I think, half-baked idea to form a government agency charged with protecting online privacy and creating “guidelines for acceptable speech on social media.” In an essay that runs for more than 6,000 words, the proposal for regulation comes after a lengthy paean to competition, and receives fewer than 200 words of description.

The lesson of the Facebook experience is that this space is too important to be left to the market. As a society, we need to decide what kind of competition we want to allow and what kind of competition we want to discourage. Perhaps we want sharp limits on how much time children are permitted to spend on these sites. Perhaps we want any site with more than 100 million users to have to open its algorithm to public review. Perhaps we want any site with more than a billion users to take editorial responsibility for speech on its platform.

I don’t have the answers here. I’m not sure anyone does. But that’s why it’s so important to start with the right question. Given how important social media platforms have proven to modern life, we should make sure the competition between them serves society’s needs, not just the market’s."

Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problem | Vox