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What does it mean for democracy when a president owns a social platform, and is supported by others with major platforms of their own? Philip Napoli directs the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and he joins Manoj Mohanan, interim public policy dean at Duke to discuss historical parallels to the connection between policy and media ownership, and regulation options. His book is called “Social Media and the Public Interest, Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age”
Policy 360
Does Ownership of Social Platforms Matter?
Conversation Highlights
Responses have been edited for clarity.
On why rules for social and broadcast media are different
It's funny you bring that up because that's one of the points I argue in the book - we've created to some degree an artificial distinction there. These are all media. If we think about the irony that right now, the FCC's authority pretty much extends almost exclusively to broadcast media (like over-the-air radio and television). [But] ask an undergraduate student the last time they watched broadcast television or listened to broadcast radio. So [broadcast media is] a proportion of our ecosystem that is of less and less consequence, yet any meaningful regulatory frameworks only apply only apply there, which is why we have the situation we have now.
on whether social platforms are responsible for content
For the overwhelming majority of situations, they absolutely are not liable at all for the content that they host and distribute.
On the power of platform ownership
There's plenty of empirical evidence that essentially Elon Musk has directed his people to reconfigure the [X] content curation algorithms so that the content skews much more right leaning, whether that's your inclination as a user or not. That was sort of our worst-case scenario that we were imagining a decade ago, which was, “My goodness, what if somebody really takes a prominent social media platform and decides to just very brazenly use it as a political influence tool?” Well, here we are. There's no ambiguity about this now.
on historical precedents for political leadership and media ownership
When [Lyndon Johnson] was elected, [he owned both radio and television stations and] I think they actually did get it put in a trust in his wife's name; she technically was the owner. But in that case, we are talking about a cluster of radio, TV stations in Texas. Nothing of the scope that we're talking about now with [X] or even the limited reach, relatively speaking, that Truth Social has.
on what guardrails might work for social media
In the book, we went back and looked [and said], “Okay, how is it possible that we have a sector of our media system broadcasting where some guardrails do exist, and those guardrails actually survived First Amendment scrutiny?” [The First Amendment is freedom of speech.]
Broadcast licensees [television and radio] are intended to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. There are some public interest obligations that come with being a broadcast licensee. Some people have argued that a model of that sort could and should find its way into the social media context, some kind of duty of care, some kind of public trustee model. I agree with that. Broadcasters can be obligated to serve the public interest because they are licensees of a public resource, the broadcast spectrum.
I argue -- I believe that there's actually something very similar going on in the social media context. There is a public resource at issue here: data. We collectively give these platforms the right to access and monetize our data, and therefore we collectively have the right to expect some public interest obligations in return. So that, in my belief, is the solution to the fundamental First Amendment problem.
on What social media regulation might look like
It might be basic things like limiting the amount of data points that platforms can use to micro-target content to us. Or requiring content moderation of disinformation or hate speech. (This is not the government making the decision about what is or is not disinformation or hate speech, but expecting minimum levels of performance in terms of how platforms go about executing their own set of policies around disinformation and hate speech.)
on whether people should get news from social media
Don't use social media as your gateway to news. By relying on social media platforms as our gateway to news, we've helped utterly decimate the economic model for producing legitimate news and information. Legitimate news and information is costly to produce. Disinformation is cheap. You don't have to do any actual reporting to create disinformation. Nothing is better than identifying reliable and trustworthy sources of news and accessing them directly.
- Find out more about Phil Napoli
- Find out more about the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke
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About Policy 360
Policy 360 is a series of policy-focused conversations hosted by Manoj Mohanan, interim Dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. New episodes premiere throughout the academic year. Guests have included luminaries like Nobel Peace Prize Winner Maria Ressa and former director of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim, as well as researchers from Duke University and other institutions. Conversations are timely and relevant.