Outlook for internet data policy: Still not so rosy
President-elect Donald Trump’s presumed FCC and FTC leadership candidates have quickly made known a desire to quash Facebook and YouTube efforts to moderate speech on their platforms, while also threatening to punish advertisers that leave right-leaning platforms like X in protest of the lack of moderation.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to head the FCC has accused some of enabling a “censorship cartel,” a term similar to those used in recent X owner Elon Musk tweets, in a November letter to leading tech platforms.
Andrew Ferguson, destined for the FTC’s top spot, accused advertisers of working in consort to boycott the platform owned by prominent Trump-backer Musk. That , according to “Social Media Companies Face Global Tug-of-War Over Free Speech,” NYT, Dec. 20, 2024.
When was the outlook for sane communications policy rosy? It’s hard to remember when or if that was ever the case.
Changes in administrations have seen FCC and FTC teeter totter between moderation and free-form when it comes to content on the Internet. Trump’s election victory sees another shift toward laisses faire communications policy, but one coupled with a call for very strict regulation of advertising.
This occurs while European governments, as the story points out, have established the GDPR, and continue to pursue restrictive measures meant to ensure data privacy and curb hate speech.
En Garde, NewsGuard!
It’s notable that policy changes envisioned by a loose group of conservative-libertarian Trump backers include further attempts to deter the work of individuals and groups studying disinformation and misinformation. Opponents see such research as part of deliberate efforts to censor conservative and libertarian views, rather than as attempts to guard against falsehoods.
The shifting landscape of communication policy is also considered in a recent piece in the Washington Post. It is titled: “This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped.”
Watching the misinformation watch dogs is the mission of upcoming FCC tzar Carr, or so it seems. Take for example NewsGuard, the company that rates news sites cited in the Post article’s headline.
NewsGuard is in fact an operation headed by luminaries from headier mainstream media days — Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. Their’s is a site that scores the credibility of news sites, which seemed like a good idea a few years ago when misinformation was viewed unfavorably. Google, Facebook and others signed up.
That was then.
In November, Brendan Carr sent a public letter to big social media platforms. He wrote to obtain information about their work with what he disarmingly described as “the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”
As in the case of Ferguson salvos directed at Twitter’s lost advertisers, the letter might have had a double intention; for the FTC and FCC heads-to-be, these may have acted as cover letters for resumes sent to the newly elected Trump.
In their mission statement, NewsGuard pledges to counter “misinformation on behalf of news consumers, brands and democracies by using apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to rate the trustworthiness of news sources and assess the accuracy of top claims spreading in the news.”
These days, them’s fighting words, although the capabilities required to trust information gain additional importance in an era when companies of all sorts collect reams of web data to train Large Language Models for AI processing.
Hold the data privacy, Elon!
The new FTC and FCC heads could in the years granted to them dramatically change the lot of power elites within communications, or merely provide a running side show as in the past.
The existing status quo could hold, according to industry observer John Battelle. He writes in “Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position” that there will be no meaningful regulation of Big Tech in 2025. To wit:
“We won’t get a national data privacy policy, we won’t get robust data portability, and we won’t get any federal clarity about how to manage AI’s impact on society.”
This is said, although Battelle adds that Big Tech seems more in the loop than ever, albeit often in the close-quarters lobbying of Elon Musk and a few others with unique takes on what goes on. The Internet as a mass medium continues to challenge whichever crew rules in the corridors of power. And, the chances that misinformation can flourish do not look like they are going down under the new regime.
