DON'T TRY TO FIX BIG TECH WITH POLITICS.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: FUTURE

I DON'T KNOW the correct level of content moderation by Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Amazon. And neither do you.

Sometimes I can pinpoint what looks to me like an obvious misstep: Facebook's decision to block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election, for instance, or Amazon's refusal to carry a small number of books about trans issues without adequately explaining its decision. Tweets containing threats of violence left up indefinitely while mere tasteless jokes get swiftly removed.

But I also know deciding what and whom to allow on your platform is a hard problem. Scale is hard: I know I'm not seeing millions of pieces of spam eliminated, bots blocked, irrelevant content filtered, duplicates removed. Consistency is hard: I know sometimes what's in my feed is the work of a robot doing a good job following bad directions, and sometimes it's a human being doing a bad job following good directions. The application of Han-Ion's razor is almost certainly called for in many cases of perceived bias: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

The difficulty of this task hasn't stopped everyone from elected politicians to think-tankers to pundits from looking for ways to punish tech companies for doing it wrong. These folks disagree about what is broken in the status quo, but the calls to action are no less strident for all that.

For every person arguing against moderation on the grounds of ideological bias, there is someone else pushing for more aggressive moderation to control rampant hate speech or "disinformation"--which can mean everything from objectively false claims to arguments that some users consider subjectively offensive. There are those who find the profit-making aspect of the whole industry distasteful, and there are those who fret about the difficulties faced by would-be competitors due to the sheer size of the companies in question.

The push to crack down on Big Tech is both bipartisan and fiercely politically tribal--the worst of both worlds.

The proposed solutions are numerous, and nearly all involve aggressive government action: break up some or all Big Tech firms via antitrust, remove longstanding liability protections by rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, treat social media platforms as public utilities or common carriers with all the constriants that entails, reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, and much more.

The...