First, welcome to Texas, Facebook. Beg your pardon, Meta.
Even if we are still adjusting to the rebranding, we are glad that one of the world’s leading companies is relocating a substantial part of its operations to Austin.
We aren’t sure what precipitated this move, but we know there are good reasons lots of businesses choose to come here, from a better regulatory environment to a fairer tax system that allows people to keep more of their hard-earned income.
That’s to say nothing of the leading minds coming out of our outstanding universities.
We expect you and your employees will find Texas as great as we do.
But even as we welcome you, we cannot turn away from serious concerns we have raised many times about the harmful ways social media is shaping our society.
There is simply no question now that the permissive regulatory structure that social media companies operate under has created an unbalanced internet — one that encourages a few powerful companies to thrive off the dissemination of third-party content with little financial or legal responsibility for what that content is or what impact it has on society.
We have imagined a different internet, one where you are not as powerful and influential, one where websites that rely on the publication of third-party generated content (versus search engines) have a much higher level of responsibility for that content than is currently required under federal law.
Facebook has given millions upon millions of people the ability to connect in positive ways. We don’t deny its benefits, even as it has profited from the data pulled from those connections.
We also know that it has been a source of constant polarization, that it has hosted terribly harmful material, including posts that propped up despotic states, that promoted genocide, that encouraged violent acts and disseminated falsehoods that have undermined democracy and endangered public health. Material that would be actionable if it came from any traditional publisher in this country.
The enormous wealth that has flowed to your company has done so because federal law freed internet companies from the same guardrails that others in the information business must adhere to. You have called for reforms, but we aren’t sure that the reforms you want are adequate to the severity of the problem we face as a nation.
Now, many conservative Texas politicians want to make sure that even your own internal policies on what is unacceptable use are weakened. Under Texas House Bill 20, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott but put on hold by a federal court, social media companies could not remove harmful and false material that violates the companies’ own terms of service.
We are in this mess because you are so big and powerful. And you are so big and powerful because Congress failed to see what the internet would become and how it should be regulated to ensure that its influence and reach was widely shared by thousands of platforms rather than concentrated in a few massive companies.
It isn’t too late to get there. But Meta, even as we welcome you, we must be honest. We aren’t sure the way things are with you are the way they need to be.
Dallas Morning News
