Facebook once more begs to be regulated

Like the data addict it is, social media giant Facebook feels it can’t be trusted to moderate its own habits and thinks state intervention may be the answer.

Reuters reports that Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) would like Facebook to be regulated in a way that’s somewhere in between how we currently regulate media companies, on once hand, and telcos. He did so in the context of people moaning about ‘bad’ content and specifically political misinformation spread over social media.

Zuck clearly thinks treating Facebook as a traditional media organisation is a step too far as it doesn’t produce its own content. But in observing that you would never punish a phone network for the stuff that passes over it, he seems to think there should be some greater degree of accountability imposed on social media companies for the content they host.

So all he’s really saying is that Facebook’s accountability for the stuff it publishes should be somewhere between 1% and 100%. Very helpful. In essence Zuck is resharing the old platform versus publisher debate and saying social media companies are neither and both – i.e. somewhere in between.

But why should Zuck want Facebook to be regulated at all? Isn’t that just inviting the state to poke its nose into his company’s private affairs? The answer is that social media censorship is an impossible task and that Facebook will never be able to please all of the people all of the time. What Zuck wants to do is find the perfect balance for his company between offloading responsibility for censorship decisions and retaining core control.

You have to wonder, however, whether Zuck has been adequately briefed on the nature of telecoms regulation. Does he know, for example, that all kinds of other things get tinkered with, including what they can charge their customers. Facebook may think a little bit of regulation will solve its content moderation problems, but letting that genie out of the lamp could well create a bunch of new ones.