New AI tools like InVideo AI can generate videos from simple text prompts. You don’t have to be a technology expert to recognize that this will take the harms of social media — cyberbullying, addiction, mental health impacts — to a whole new level. But breathless, gee-whiz coverage of the rollout of these tools ignores this, as if to say, “what could possibly go wrong?”
The striking thing about watching META CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans get grilled on the harms social media cause, especially to young people, is their apparent cluelessness about the damage their arrogance could do to their own brands, Zuckerberg’s fauxpology notwithstanding.
Now they’re increasingly getting called out, including in a new lawsuit brought against tech companies by New York’s Mayor Eric Adams, a bill to regulate social media platforms moving through the Colorado state legislature and the Kids’ Online Safety Act, which would mandate new controls and default settings for social media.
All this, plus the spectacle of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) telling tech CEOs “you have blood on your hands,” telegraph a backlash that should set tech companies’ reputational risk alarm bells ringing. Why don’t they act to remedy the problem?
Maybe it’s because they fail to see the need. Senate hearings are mostly treated as political theatre and vaporize within minutes of the closing gavel. By now the witnesses know the script and have rehearsed their bland responses, predictable parries and evasions of demands for “Yes or No” answers with techie non sequiturs invoking “our tools.” There really is no incentive for them to operate for the public good or practice “corporate social responsibility,” whatever that phrase may mean to them. They would just argue they are a public good unto themselves, since they operate a digital public square where billions of people can chat, share and debate.
After all, though their reputations may get temporarily dented, they will live to make money another day. Barring a really massive lawsuit or new legislation with serious teeth, any damage to their bottom line will be negligible. Facebook’s parent company Meta increased earnings 25 percent in the fourth quarter, to $40 billion.
Critics may cheer Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) fierce questioning of Zuckerberg, only to pick up their smartphone and vent their outrage through — what else? — social media platforms. Distracted, they may note an advertisement on their feed that has micro-targeted them using their personal data that they gave up unknowingly. They are hopelessly addicted to a free service that isn’t free. In fact, these platforms are the greatest cash cows ever invented.
No momentarily cathartic Senate hearing or a bill requiring more “tools” and “parental controls” is going to change that. The Senate is in fact complicit, because it helped establish immunity from legal action that the parents of the deceased children could otherwise have brought against the tech companies and content providers for the harms they caused. It voted up Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which now has a particularly Orwellian ring to it) giving the industry a free pass to host harmful speech in the first place.
The only other industry that enjoys such broad immunity is the gun industry. Gun manufacturers leverage it to avoid making common-sense changes to their business practices that would save lives. There is no reason to expect the tech industry to behave any differently.
Social media platforms host disinformation and shamelessly mendacious or incendiary political content. They permit malign parties including foreign enemies to meddle in our elections. They violate privacy by micro-targeting ads with few restrictions. They expose kids to dangerous content like pornography and to harassment. Yet the owners are no more accountable for the harms these things cause than the gun manufacturers are for gun violence.
Yes, they started to do an incrementally better job combatting disinformation and some forms of hate speech by adding human moderators and tweaking their algorithms. Then last year the major platforms drastically reduced the size of their teams working on trust, safety and ethics. They know what to do, they could solve the systemic problems if they chose. They just aren’t doing it.
The tech moguls had no plan to announce at the Senate hearing — no interest in reparations to victims, no admission of real responsibility for the harms or their capacity to stop them, no recognition that their vaunted “tools” could be scaled up from a fig leaf to a solution if they were serious about attacking the problem.
The industry clearly won’t police itself. It needs tighter regulation. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates these same platforms robustly, holding tech companies accountable for harmful content. Why can’t we?
Congress needs to do more to rein in social media than add a few more tools or parental controls. It should commission experts to assess what other technical fixes it would take to actually solve the systemic problems and then hold the industry to account for using them. At the same time, it should make the companies liable for the harms they cause by repealing CDA Section 230, which would allow victims to sue for damages.
But ultimately, to redeem this untenable situation, tech companies will have to change their culture from within. Dragging them unwillingly into the spotlight, shaming them with the cancel culture they themselves invented and can manipulate, and slapping some extra controls on them that they will find ways around will only get us so far.
As I tell my students, the future chief reputation officers of corporate America, and as they will tell their future bosses, these companies don’t just need to be policed and held responsible for the harm they do; they need to actively embrace a gold standard of truth and civility, and take responsibility for the good they can do.
Doug Barry teaches reputation management at The George Washington University.