In Defense of Internet Data.

• Author: Lenard, Thomas M.

The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has exacerbated the current dystopian view of the internet, leading to policy recommendations that strike at the heart of the digital economy. For example, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an "anti-monopoly" group, recommends banning targeted advertising by communications platforms, arguing that the January 6 riot was to a large extent caused by the business models of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The fundamental problem, according to the AELP, is that these "monopolists make billions from promoting misinformation, conspiracy theories, and violence."

The AELP is not alone. In a February 11 New York Times column, Cornell economist Robert Frank labeled the targeted advertising business model of firms like Facebook and Google a "profound threat to the nation's political and social stability." To address the problem, he recommends abandoning the advertising-based model in favor of a subscription-based model. The CEO of German media conglomerate Axel Springer has proposed prohibiting the commercial use of private data. In a January 29 New York Times op-ed, Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff also alleges a connection between the activities of internet platforms and "Donald Trump's attempted coup." Echoing the theme of her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she asserts that gathering and using information on people's internet browsing habits is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. (See "The Tech Giants Are Out to Get You," Summer 2019.)

There is little question that groups involved in the January 6 riot used social media to communicate and recruit converts. But the implication that, but for the availability of these platforms, events like this would not occur indicates a lack of historical perspective. There are, unfortunately, all too many examples of mob violence that predate the invention of social media, from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, to the Tulsa race riots, to Kristallnacht, to name only a few. The notion that internet platforms are responsible for such events today when such events occurred in the past is farfetched.

Even aside from the events of January 6, it is frequently asserted that the internet, and particularly social media, are major causes of polarization in the United States. However, research on "affective polarization"--defined as the extent to which citizens feel more negatively toward other...