Social media companies have become some of the largest companies in the United States, but could the government do anything to regulate content?
Earlier this month, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before members of Congress about Facebook and misinformation. She urged the government to get involved with the boards of the social media platforms to give them more teeth overseeing content. Ohio Northern Law Professor Bruce Frohnen says how people look at the information is subjective and what this could lead us to is a bunch of lawsuits.
“I think what we are coming into here is a couple of decades of variable chaos,” says Frohnen. “You are going to have lawsuits coming, Donald Trump suing to get his (Twitter) page back on the internet. You are going to have people suing over to what happened to their speech and being demonetized and so on. And probably what you are going to have over the next several decades. You are going to have a great deal of fighting and frankly what is going to settle it is the new technology. “
Frohnen says it would even be hard to break up the large social media companies into smaller companies as the government did for the telephone industry decades ago because social media doesn’t have specific geographical areas.
