As lawmakers question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week, it’s clear many are wondering if and how the government should regulate tech companies. A recurring question is whether they have inherent ideological biases.
In his Senate testimony, Zuckerberg called Silicon Valley “an extremely left-wing place.” While regional and probably employee-level voter patterns at tech companies suggest this is true, it would be wrong to classify Silicon Valley companies themselves as left-leaning or with any kind of partisan leaning. Instead, corporations have more of an authoritarian-libertarian bias. This may have served the industry well in the past, but is proving problematic now that the industry is so involved in our daily lives.
To see how Silicon Valley got here, I think back to my former experience working in eBay’s trust and safety division in 2004 and 2005. I was part of a team that struggled with some of the same challenges facing the tech industry is facing. today – although it took a few years for social media and smartphones to become part of the social fabric.
Through the lens of 2018, some of eBay’s initial values look problematic, but they seemed lofty and ambitious at the time. “We believe that people are fundamentally good.” “We believe everyone has something to contribute.” At the time, the internet was seen as a democratizing force for good, where everyone should be encouraged to participate. On eBay’s platform, small sellers were allowed to compete on the same playing field as large “power sellers”.
When the trust division was discussing rolling out a “captcha” test to ensure there was indeed a human logging into an account rather than a bot, a senior executive pointed out that the accessibility of eBay allowed some people with disabilities to run businesses. We needed to make sure that any of our policy changes didn’t negatively impact them – like a visual-only captcha test would on users with limited vision.
eBay was sort of one of the first “neutral platforms” on the internet. This neutrality made the company vulnerable to fraud, as people who used eBay at the time can attest. Users did not have to prove their identity to open an account. There were groups of fraudsters, especially in Romania and Nigeria, who tried to hack into eBay accounts and trick users into sending them money through payment platforms like Western Union. Yet decision makers at the top of the company were reluctant to implement harsh policy changes that could combat this fraud, fearing it would both go against company values and hurt growth. of the company.
It’s not hard to see how the values that fueled eBay in its early years have been adopted by Facebook and other companies. As Zuckerberg said in his testimonial, “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company.” Later, in response to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about whether Facebook was a neutral platform, Zuckerberg replied, “We see ourselves as a platform for all ideas.” But “all ideas” implies that there is a place for both polite speech and hate speech.
Truly neutral platforms on sites like Facebook and Twitter would seem to avoid issues of partisan bias that could be problematic for lawmakers, but such a libertarian ethos also allows for plenty of shenanigans. “Neutral” can eliminate one type of bias but create other vulnerabilities that companies don’t know how to fix.
These companies are run like benevolent dictatorships, where we are forced to trust CEOs to get it right. This structure is no accident. When companies like Facebook and Snap went public, they ensured that their CEOs would still have control of the companies through the voting rights assigned to their shares. Snap shares issued to the public have no voting rights.
The reason CEOs are in control is that they are better able to operate with the long term in mind rather than volatile, quarter-to-quarter public markets. But this structure also raises the question of how the public can agitate for change if they are unhappy with the way these companies are governed.
Big tech companies have shown they are ready to respond to public pressure. The sight of Zuckerberg in a suit and tie in front of Congress bears witness to this. And although the platforms claim to be neutral, they have internal standards; you won’t see any nudity on Facebook, for example. But as these companies transition from growth to maturity, it’s hard to think monthly congressional hearings are realistic and appropriate. We see the need for a different type of corporate governance than Silicon Valley is used to.
© 2018 Bloomberg L.P.
Tech
