It’s time to break up Facebook. This is the stunning argument made in a recent op-ed by Chris Hughes, who roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and co-founded Facebook.
Hughes argues that Facebook now has too much power over public life. I don’t share his panic about Russian manipulation of social media in the runup to 2016. (Did Vladimir Putin prevent Hillary Clinton from campaigning in Wisconsin?) Even so, I think Hughes is right. No CEO should be in the business of deciding who gets free speech.
Hughes has added his voice to a growing chorus calling for action against Facebook. Sen. Liz Warren has led the way among Democrats, followed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has begun to revive the trust-busting spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. In September, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a meeting with state attorneys general to discuss whether tech companies were in violation of antitrust law. In November, President Trump said his administration was “looking into” antitrust violations at Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Republican politicians with impeccable conservative credentials support these moves. “The giant tech companies today are larger and more powerful than Standard Oil when it was broken up,” Sen. Ted Cruz has said. “They’re larger and more powerful than AT&T was when it was broken up. If we have tech companies using the powers of monopoly to censor political speech, I think that raises real antitrust issues.”
Some economists worry that breaking up tech companies would harm the competitiveness of Silicon Valley. It’s a serious concern, but it may not be enough to deter this new wave of trust-busters. Josh Hawley, a young Republican senator from Missouri, recently gave a speech at the Hoover Institution asking whether the gig economy was actually serving American interests.
“It is heresy to say that here, … but is Silicon Valley — the platforms, the products, the business models it has been giving us of late — really the best that our best minds have to offer?”
Before entering politics, Hawley wrote a well-regarded intellectual biography of Teddy Roosevelt for Yale University Press. Now he is bringing back TR’s belief that government has a role to play in making sure private enterprise serves the common good.
As Hawley puts it, Roosevelt believed “careful, limited government action could make the market work for civic character, make it a force again for orderly liberty and a morally wholesome prosperity.” In his time, “the industrial economy had become a threat to the rule of the people … partly because its sheer size swallowed individual agency, but also because it rewarded the wrong things.” “Use regulation to make it reward honesty, thrift and initiative,” TR thought, “ and the market would become a prop rather than a menace” to freedom.
This is a conservative vision that rejects socialist utopia along with hard-line free-market ideology (socialists and libertarians alike envision the “withering away of the state”).
Some on the right believe the Republican Party should be a consistent champion of laissez-faire. In their view, any attempt to enforce antitrust law is the first step on the road to serfdom. These concerns had broad appeal when America faced off against Soviet totalitarianism. Today we face different challenges: global corporations that resist political accountability and show little concern for the common good. In this situation, government itself becomes a kind of “mediating society,” standing between the individual and forces beyond his control.
Government efforts to restrict market actors won’t be perfect. But our government, for all its faults, is responsive to the American people in a way that monopolies like Facebook never will be. As Hughes points out, Facebook is already making highly political decisions about what content people will and won’t see. These decisions should be made by the American people — not by unaccountable tech overlords.
Trump has promised that America will never be a socialist country. Fulfilling that promise requires moderating markets in creative ways. Here Trump has something to learn from the other Roosevelt.
When Norman Thomas, the six-time Socialist Party presidential nominee, was asked whether FDR had carried out the socialist vision, he replied: “He carried it out on a stretcher.” Only if Republicans are similarly willing to defy libertarian orthodoxy will they defeat socialism in our time. Breaking up Facebook is a good place to start.
Matthew Schmitz is senior editor of First Things. Twitter: @MatthewSchmitz