Social Media CEOs Can’t Defend Their Business Model

Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai testified before Congress for a hearing titled “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role In Promoting Extremism And Misinformation.” If you tuned in looking for dumb questions, annoying partisan talking points, and exasperatingly squishy discussions of “misinformation” and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, you would not have been disappointed. However! The five-and-a-half-hour hearing also contained flashes of promise, when members of Congress did something they have very rarely done in these situations: drilling down on the business incentives that drive bad consequences, rather than just browbeating the companies for their content moderation decisions. Representative after representative took turns describing the relationship between monetizing user attention in order to serve personalized ads, on the one hand, and the proliferation of extreme and false material, on the other. Focusing on the attention-driven business model seems to have been a coordinated strategy among the committee’s Democrats, but they were not alone.