Before Another Hearing, Senate Weighs Confidence in Social Media Self-Regulation

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., also a committee member, told us lawmakers need to decide how much confidence they have in this relatively new industry and how much “white space” there is when considering regulations or guidance to prevent future data exploitation. Tillis believes industry can self-regulate through “very strong and consistent” business codes of conduct, and both political parties have exploited data. He cited his recent exchange with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the 2012 Obama presidential campaign’s alleged scraping of Facebook data (see 1804100054 and 1804110065). “Those should be termination offenses, and they should be reported. Those are the sorts of things you can do through corporate compliance,” Tillis said.

In addition to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook suspended about 200 different applications suspected of misusing data, the company said Monday. Any violators will be banned, the platform said. “There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people’s Facebook data -- and it will take time,” said Facebook Vice President-Product Partnerships Ime Archibong. “We are investing heavily to make sure this investigation is as thorough and timely as possible.” Former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie will testify Wednesday, along with Tufts University associate professor Eitan Hersh and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Jamison.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., hopes the hearing produces insight on privacy bills he introduced. The week Zuckerberg testified, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Blumenthal introduced the Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-provider Network Transgressions (Consent) Act (S-2639), pitched as a “privacy bill of rights” (see 1804100054). Blumenthal previously introduced the Managing Your Data Against Telecom Abuses Act (My Data) Act (S-964). Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., offered a bipartisan response with the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act (S-2728) (see 1804300048). “There’s very strong bipartisan interest,” Blumenthal said. “Privacy is not a partisan issue and should not be, and I think there is a good deal of appetite for doing something. But obviously in this session, there are clearly obstacles because of timing.”

Niskanen Center Director-Technology Policy Ryan Hagemann said think tanks and interest groups might be hesitant to participate in Capitol Hill’s ongoing conversation over privacy because of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on platform censorship 1804250072 and 1804260055. The Electronic Frontier Foundation declined to testify there, even though it was on the original witness list. Committee staff then cobbled together a roster of last-minute witnesses, with explosive Q&A with a pair of conservative social media personalities Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, known as Diamond and Silk. Hagemann described the hearing as a “low-point” for the conversation over social media, quickly devolving into a “circus.”

NetChoice President Steve DelBianco, whose e-commerce trade association includes Facebook and Google as members, said Zuckerberg needs to purge any bad actors who abused access like Cambridge Analytica, since that would be faster and better than legislation: “It’s critical to preserve Facebook as an effective and affordable place for small businesses and organizations to do micro-targeted advertising.”

Hagemann argued self-regulation in tech worked relatively well since the 1990s, and he expects a return to the status quo, once the “brouhaha” over Facebook-Cambridge Analytica dies down, especially with platforms rapidly working to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect May 25 (see 1805140001). Data privacy is “going to continue to be an issue that lawmakers hammer them on, but I don’t think that there’s going to be a worry for really big, really profound changes to the way operators in the online ecosystem really operate,” Hagemann said.