Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in November 2016 was a turning point not just in politics, but also in technology. The narrative about its role in society began to change quickly, and Big Tech took blame for eroding democracy. Today the US is looking ahead to another presidential election, but three years on from the last one, it’s hard to see how much progress has been made.
Nobody expected these big, thorny questions of free speech and platform governance to be solved quickly. But for all that has happened between 2016 and now, it’s only in the past year that real policies have started being built out, and even then they are often deployed with what seems like little thought.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing fight over political advertising. Tech platforms may be similar to each other in how slowly they’ve reacted, but they are dealing with these problems differently. Facebook refuses to cast judgment on political advertising, meaning that its team of fact-checkers will not review anything a candidate says in a paid advertisement. That’s why the Trump campaign could place an ad that lied about Joe Biden’s connection to Ukraine and why Elizabeth Warren could goad Mark Zuckerberg by buying an intentionally false ad.
Facebook has faced plenty of pushback for this stance. But Zuckerberg, in claiming to defend the ideals of free expression, continues to paint it as a choice between accepting lies in political advertising and, as he said in a Georgetown speech, living in a world where “you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true.”
This is a false choice, as shown by Google, which has banned microtargeting and “false claims” in political advertising. Twitter, meanwhile—with some pointed dunking of Facebook—has completely banned political advertising, including issue ads.
The first primaries of 2020 are two months away, and we are barely closer to understanding what these companies are doing. It seems they are not ready. As a result, everyone else seemed to realize the truth of the adage “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
So we have Elizabeth Warren making the push to break up dominant companies a big part of her platform. Congress, meanwhile, held a hearing on Section 230, a piece of internet legislation that protects technology companies from being sued for what people post. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called Section 230 a “gift” to tech companies that they weren’t treating with respect.)
The 2016 election made it clear just how big the problems are, and the looming 2020 election highlights how little is being done. The result is that people are “beginning to question the narrative of technical inevitability and question the idea that technical progress that helps large tech companies is in fact social progress,” says Meredith Whittaker of New York University’s AI Now Institute. One of the conclusions from the Institute’s annual year-end report (released in early December) is that community groups, workers, and researchers—and not corporate ethics policies or anything the companies are doing—are responsible for stepping up oversight of technology.
Increasingly, everyone is realizing that companies are not going to change by themselves, and that it’ll take a presidential campaign or a big worker movement to make things happen. Or as Shona Clarkson, an organizer with the activist group Gig Workers Rising that helped pass the California law, put it: “These companies are afraid, and that just shows us that when drivers come together to fight back, it is powerful and it is influential.” So in 2020, the big question for tech companies is: Will you change on your own, or will you wait for everyone else to force your hand?