Problems with social media?
The solutions will come from capitalist innovation. Not from bigger government.
The dominant Big Tech companies — Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — fear each other far more than they fear politicos and Uncle Sam.
Superstar teams don't fear the refs. They fear their rivals.
One hundred U.S. senators sit around, still in togas, contemplating whether to outlaw fire. Or to regulate it.
Give 'em another million years ...
Meanwhile, as Professor Scott Galloway points out in his most recent No Mercy/No Malice column (explaining why Apple is on course to become the first company with trillion dollar revenue):
"One of the great brand moves in history was anticipating the increasing relevance of privacy and staking huge capital and focus on it. Apple's much vaunted iOS tracking change was a ninja move, registering damage not from sheer force, but by striking where it hurts the most. ...
"Tim Cook cost Facebook a quarter of its market cap just flexing its privacy muscles. ..."
The real action happens in the marketplace. Not the government.
Meanwhile, lefty hysterics (hello AOC and President Joe!) still embrace the "Big Brother Knows Best" fallacy. Think that after over two dozen epic fails at bringing about a socialist workers' paradise they'd get a clue?
Nyet, comrade!
Admittedly, I am the co-founder and chairman of the 184,000-follower Capitalist League. Maybe I'm biased.
Or ... maybe socialism's relentless failures persuaded me of the relative merits of capitalism. Socialism is a form of romantic utopianism.
Stephen Asma's formulation: Socialists believe in "reality by consent rather than proof." Facepalm!
Consider Dr. Rainer Zitelmann's interview at with Kristian Niemietz. author of "Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies," and head of political economy at the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs, in Forbes a couple of years ago:
"Rainer Zitelmann: In your book, you write that socialism has always failed. Looking back through human history, are there really no examples of socialist systems that have actually worked?
"Kristian Niemietz: No. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Laos, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others — not counting the very short-lived ones. All of these attempts have ended in varying degrees of failure."
Meanwhile deepfakes in the GOP (hello Tailgunner Josh and Cancun Ted!) who know better, or should, seemingly believe that their Trumpenproletariat voter base will fall for the "Cynical Senators™" there's a sucker born every minute shtick.
Hey, they might!
Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz apparently intend to use a "Let's violate the Tenth Commandment" (Thou shalt not covet) tactic, hippie-punching the super-rich leftish-libertarian Tech Bros, to snag themselves a presidency.
Thereby vaulting Red China into world dominance. Facepalm!
True, Facebook has underinvested in content moderation, generating some quality control problems. However, both the loony left's and the fringe right's claims that social media is biased against them cannot possibly be right.
Now here comes Truth Social. I've already registered, wishing the new kid luck.
That said, the dogs bark but the caravan moves on. Twitter has 400 million users, more than 5x Trump's 72M 2020 votes. The network effect makes it hard to peel off even a few million.
"Free" speech? The First Amendment forbids the government from dictating what we can and cannot say. Free enterprises may, must, and will adopt standards.
Truth Social will, too. Social media, despite disproportionate attention to its political content, is predominantly apolitical.
Largely unmoderated image boards gave rise to a cesspool of hatefulness. Per CNET:
"The anything-goes attitude has led chan boards to become swamps of hateful commentary. One board in particular, 8chan, became a magnet for these posts. After suspected shooters in at least three mass shootings in 2019 posted screeds on 8chan ... 8chan was forced offline when internet security company Cloudflare and other providers decided to stop working with the site."
Problems with Big Tech? What to do?
Capitalism. That's what.
I have the unfair advantage of being old. I recall when IBM was the Master of the Digital Universe, unassailable.
Until punk kid Bill Gates knocked Big Blue right off its pedestal. Microsoft went on to dominate Big Digital, forever.
Until, that is, Google Chrome whacked IE and Apple and Android dominated mobile.
Incoming hot? The metaverse, on which Mark Zuckerberg just bet the Company-Formerly-Known-as-Facebook.
Workers of the world, unite! The queen bees of the socialist left and populist right bait and switch, delivering nothing but misery for us worker bees.
Innovation through competition, not legislation and regulation, will bring solutions to what Big Tech gets wrong. The left is hopeless.
But memo to the GOP: Capitalism truly works wonders!
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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