Cato At Liberty

In the early days of the Internet, citing concerns about pedophiles and hackers, parents would worry about their children’s engagement on unfamiliar platforms. Now, those same parents have Facebook accounts and get their news from Twitter. However, one look at a newspaper shows op-eds aplenty castigating the platforms that host an ever-growing share of our social lives. Even after more than a decade of social media use, prominent politicians and individuals who lack critical awareness of the realities and limitations of social media platforms choose to scapegoat platforms—rather than people—for a litany of social problems. Hate speech on Facebook? Well, it’s obviously Facebook’s fault. Fake news? Obviously created by Twitter.

But, what if these political concerns are misplaced? In a new Cato Policy Analysis, Georgia Tech’s Milton Mueller argues that that the moral panic attending social media is misplaced. Mueller contends that social media “makes human interactions hypertransparent,” rendering hitherto unseen social and commercial interactions visible and public. This newfound transparency “displace[s] the responsibility for societal acts from the perpetrators to the platform that makes them visible.” Individuals do wrong, platforms are condemned. This makes no political nor moral sense. Social media platforms are blamed for a diverse array of social ills, ranging from hate speech and addiction to mob violence and terrorism. In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, foreign electoral interference and the spread of misinformation were also laid at their feet. However, these woes are not new, and the form and tenor of concerns about social media misuse increasingly resembles a classic moral panic. Instead of appreciating that social media has revealed misconduct previously ignored, tolerated, or swept under the rug, social media is too often understood as the root cause of these perennial problems. 

People behaved immorally long before the advent of social media platforms and will continue to do so long after the current platforms are replaced by something else. Mueller argues that today’s misplaced moral panic is “based on a false premise and a false promise.” The false premise? Social media controls human behavior. The false promise? Imposing new rules on intermediaries will solve what are essentially human problems.

Mueller’s examination of Facebook’s role in hosting genocidal Burmese propaganda drives this point home. When Burmese authorities began using Facebook to encourage violence against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, Facebook was slow to act— it had few employees who could read Burmese, rendering the identification of offending messages difficult. However, Facebook has since been blamed for massacres of Rohingya carried out by Myanmar’s military and Buddhist extremists. While Facebook provided a forum for this propaganda, it cannot be seen as having caused violence that was prompted and supported by state authorities. We should be glad that Facebook could subsequently prevent the use of its platform by Myanmar’s generals, but we cannot expect Facebook to singlehandedly stop a sovereign state from pursuing a policy of mass murder. Myanmar’s government, not Facebook, is responsible for its messaging and the conduct of its armed forces.

Mueller shows that technologies enhancing transparency get blamed for the problems they reveal. The advent of the printing press, radio, television, and even inexpensive comic books were all followed by moral panics and calls for regulation. The ensuing regulation caused unforeseen harm. Mueller finds that “the federal takeover of the airwaves led to a systemic exclusion of diverse voices,” while recent German social media regulation “immediately resulted in suppression of various forms of politically controversial online speech.” Acting on the false premise that social media is responsible for grievances expressed through it, regulation intended to stamp out hate merely addresses its visible symptoms.

Contra these traditional, counterproductive responses, Mueller advocates greater personal responsibility; if we do not like what we see on social media we should remember that it is the speech of our fellow users, not that of the platforms themselves. He also urges resistance to government attempts to regulate social media, either by directly regulating speech, or by altering intermediary liability regimes to encourage more restrictive private governance. Proceeding from the false premise that a “broken” social media is responsible for the ills it reveals, regulation will simply suppress speech. Little will be gained, and much may be lost.

You really couldn’t script it.  

Faced with campaign staff complaining their hourly wages are too low, 2020 presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), he of “Fight for $15” federal minimum wage fame, is currently mitigating discontent by restricting the hours his staff can work rather than raising their pay.

Salaried Sanders field staff earning $36,000 have complained of working up 60 hours per week. Once one accounts for the number of weeks they work, they say this is equivalent to just $13 per hour.

Given Sanders describes $15 per hour as a living wage (something he wants to institute through federal legislation), the union representing his workers demands a rise in salary to $46,800 to fully compensate for their current activities. Instead, at least while discussions continue, Sanders will cap the hours the staff can work, such that their current salary equates to no less than a $15 minimum wage per hour.

This serves as a useful lesson in the trade-offs associated with pay hikes. In order to raise the hourly pay of his staff, Sanders is having to restrict the hours they work. Presuming they were at least doing something productive in the additional time they currently spend campaigning, this hour cap represents a fall in the overall “product” of the workers, and so, one imagines, will weaken the campaign.

The Sanders camp obviously thought other “channels of adjustment” to hourly wage rises were even more unpalatable. His campaign could have laid off field staffers, for example, cut back on other campaign expenses such as rallies or ads, or even sought to undertake one-off investments in campaign tools to “automate” workers by shifting to electronic electioneering. It turns out too that Sanders’ campaign doesn’t believe in fairy tales one hears about how higher wages will induce much more highly productive and loyal workers, making increased pay self-financing (in this case with a better campaign attracting more donations).

Perhaps next time Bernie Sanders advocates that all employers nationwide face an elevated minimum wage, his experience will make him realize the potential costs of cuts to jobs, hours, other worker perks, or the efficiency of the firms affected.

Last year, the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services worked within federal law to expand consumer protections and restore Americans’ freedom to choose the health insurance that meets their needs. On Friday, a federal court rebuffed an effort to block those protections and force Americans into ObamaCare. First, a little background.

In 1996, Congress exempted “short-term limited duration insurance” from federal health insurance regulations. Congress never defined what “short-term” or “limited duration” meant. So in 1997, the Clinton administration gave meaning to those terms by decreeing that health insurance plans qualify for the exemption so long as they have a contract term, and a total duration, that last less than 12 months. The Bush administration finalized this definition in 2004. 

When Congress enacted the ironically named Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, it tied that law’s copious regulation of the individual health insurance market to the same definition of health insurance Congress created in 1996. That means – you guessed it – “short-term, limited duration insurance” is also exempt from the ACA’s costly regulations.

When the ACA began to make the cost of health insurance soar in 2014, the Obama admininstration noticed that consumers were taking refuge in the short-term market, where premiums could be 50-70 percent lower than ACA premiums. So in 2016, the Obama administration arbitrarily shortened the maximum allowable contract term of such plans to 3 months.

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