Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future

By Robby Soave

From award-winning journalist and author of the “methodical, earnest, and insightful” (The Guardian) Panic Attack, an examination of recent kneejerk calls to regulate Big Tech from both sides of the aisle.

Not so long ago, we embraced social media as a life-changing opportunity to connect with friends and family all across the globe. Today, the pendulum of public opinion is swinging in the opposite direction as Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and similar sites are being accused of corrupting our democracy, spreading disinformation, and fanning the flames of hatred. We once marveled at the revolutionary convenience of ordering items online and having them show up on our doorsteps overnight. Now we fret about Amazon outsourcing our jobs overseas or building robots to do them for us.

With insightful analysis and in-depth research, Robby Soave offers “a refreshing dose of sanity and common sense about big tech” (David French, author of Divided We Fall) and explores some of the biggest issues animating both the right and the left: bias, censorship, disinformation, privacy, screen addiction, crime, and more. Far from polemical, Tech Panic is grounded in interviews with insiders at companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as expert analysis by both tech boosters and skeptics—from Mark Zuckerberg to Josh Hawley. You will learn not just about the consequences of Big Tech, but also the consequences of altering the ecosystem that allowed tech to get big. Offering a fresh and crucial perspective on one of the biggest influences of the 21st century, Soave seeks to stand athwart history and yell, Wait, are we sure we really want to do this?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982159610

Robby Soave

Robby Soave is an award-winning journalist and author. He is a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, where he writes about free speech, education and tech policy, criminal justice reform, and cancel culture, among other subjects. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, US News & World Report, and more. In 2016, Forbes named him to the “30 Under 30” list in the category of law and policy. In 2017, he became a Novak Fellow at The Fund for American Studies. He also serves on the DC Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. Soave appears frequently on TV and radio.

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INTRODUCTION

FEAR OF THE FUTURE

I have always valued my lifelessness.

—Tik-Tok (the early-twentieth-century L. Frank Baum character, not the early-twenty-first-century social media platform)

Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I had what was to be my first—and last—real job outside of the field of journalism: I sold cable, door-to-door, for Comcast. This was during the summer of 2007, in the middle-class suburbs of Detroit, Michigan.

Some people are natural salesmen. Most are not. I fell into this larger, latter category. Selling cable was hard.

My mostly unsuccessful foray into the world of door-to-door sales occurred at the time of the U.S. transition from analog to digital television. Hailed as the most significant innovation in the television space since color TV, digital cable offered better picture quality than an analog connection—which used an antenna, satellite dish, or other transmitter—as well as more channels. When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law, they had specified December 31, 2006, as the date that all analog television transmission in the country would cease. That date was later changed to December 31, 2007, and finally to February 8, 2009.

Due to various government subsidies and corporate promotions, the cost of the conversion was heavily discounted for customers: In fact, Comcast’s upgrade from analog to digital was free for customers. You might think it would be easy to sell something that was better and free. Not for me. Wherever I went, suspicion followed. The people who answered their doors generally didn’t want to talk about the amazing new products Comcast had to offer, or anything else—and if they did want to talk, they mostly had a list of grievances to rattle off: outages, connection troubles, billing irregularities. (It probably didn’t help that Comcast has a reputation for notoriously poor customer service, and is frequently ranked among the most hated companies in America, according to consumer surveys—a reality I came to understand all too well as I peddled the company’s services.)¹

,²

You would have thought I was selling dead animals, rather than free access to a superior technology that would soon be mandated across the country. I eventually learned things went more smoothly if I didn’t even present the upgrade as a choice, and instead led with some version of: On what day would you like this installed?

One encounter with a customer still sticks in mind, more than a dozen years later. She was a middle-aged woman, and I didn’t have to knock on her door. She sat on her porch, glaring at me as I approached in my lime green Comcast polo shirt, clipboard in hand. (I used it to take orders, fill out customer satisfaction surveys, and occasionally, as a shield.) She was skeptical about the digital upgrade, and furious in general. She had a number of problems with her service, and her bill. Worst of all, the remote control for her TV was broken. I sympathized—I still sympathize! It’s an infuriating problem to have. (My Verizon FIOS remote stopped working recently; I eventually gave up on trying to procure a replacement via the byzantine FIOS website, and instead bought a new one from Amazon, which speaks volumes about that company’s comparative convenience.)

The woman’s remote was either her main issue, or had come to represent all that was wrong with her cable service. She went back inside and then returned with the faulty device, wielding it like a medieval battle mace.

Ma’am, you’re in luck, I told her. The upgrade I was offering—the free upgrade—would automatically come with a new, better remote. And I will never forget the look of pure revulsion she gave me, as if I had threatened her with bodily harm.

Now, what the hell, she said, clutching the item ever more tightly, would I do with a new remote?

My irate Comcast customer is in good company. Many people have an innate distrust of new technology. We like to complain about our stuff, but we also tend to prefer things just the way they are, thank you very much.

This is especially true of innovations in human communication. Mankind is a social animal, and thus in theory we welcome new methods of holding conversations across vast distances. But we also tend to worry that new technology is corrupting something human or genuine about day-to-day social interaction.

In fact, every new invention that expands the communicative space has been accompanied by concerns and hand-wringing about the potential for misuse and abuse. Historically, many of these complaints are precisely the same ones we hear today: Technology has made us addicted to it.

In 1936, for instance, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a determined movement had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused accidents. Indeed, contrary to how ubiquitous the radio would become, it was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the dangers of radio. The Charlotte News fretted in 1926 that radio was keeping children and their parents up late nights, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep and making laggards out of them at school. In his 1963 book, Passion and Social Constraint, the Dutch sociologist Ernest van den Haag lamented that the portable radio is taken everywhere—from seashore to mountaintop—and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings. Mass media, according to van den Haag, alienates us from each other, from reality, and from ourselves.

In 1898, the New York Times panned Thomas Edison’s newly invented phonograph. (For younger readers who may not know, that was the early record player with the funny-looking horn attached to it.) Our very small boys will fear to express themselves with childish freedom, wrote the Times. Who will be willing even in the bosom of his family to express any but the most innocuous and colorless views? As the authors of the Pessimists Archive—a fascinating Twitter account, and the source of these examples—put it, the Times was essentially articulating the most modern concern of all: Edison’s invention would lead to cancel culture.

Something ought to be done to Mr. Edison, wrote the Times in another article. And there is a growing conviction that it ought to be done with a hemp rope. Newspapers were so freaked out about Edison’s revolution in communications that they wanted him dead.

Today, the manifestation of that fear is social media—the subject of this book.

Despite the extremely polarized political era in which we live, concern about the pernicious influence of Big Tech—a term for the major tech companies, and one that is almost always deployed pejoratively—is remarkably bipartisan. Pundits on both sides of the ideological spectrum can routinely be found railing against Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, 4Chan, Telegram, and Parler. Regulations that would significantly impede the operations of major social media companies, or even break them up entirely, are as popular among liberal Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) as they are among conservative Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley (R–Mo.). In the past year alone, critics representing all corners of society have accused Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of a dizzying array of offenses: from profiting off hate and abusing customers’ privacy to spoiling the U.S. presidential election and spreading unsound medical advice about COVID-19.

This is despite the fact—or perhaps partly because of it—that social media has become a ubiquitous aspect of modern life. At present, more than 2.7 billion people use Facebook. Google processes 3.7 billion searches each day. Wikipedia has more than 6 million articles. (I know because I looked up this information on Wikipedia.)

People all over the world and from all walks of life use social media to meet new friends, share photos with their families, for work, for pleasure, to keep up with the news, as entertainment, as distraction, to speak, to celebrate, to mourn, and to vent. Users of the preferred platforms do vary by age, gender, profession, and other distinguishing characteristics: Older folks seem to have settled on Facebook as the kids move on to the next big thing, though one can find plenty of counterexamples: Yes, there are grandmas on TikTok. Millennials’ love for Instagram is rivaled only by their love of avocado toast, while Gen Z has been moving toward Snapchat. Reddit’s user base is overwhelmingly young and male; the outsize role that Twitter plays in the political news cycle reflects its wildly disproportionate popularity among journalists and politicos.³

But neither the increasing omnipresence of social media nor our reliance on it has made the companies themselves more popular with government leaders. In April 2018, Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress for the first time to answer leading and loaded questions about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. A precedent was clearly set; the thirty-six-year-old CEO made multiple appearances on Capitol Hill in 2020. Legislators were no friendlier to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—each of whom was summoned to Washington, D.C., to account for various problems allegedly posed by their technology: everything from bias and censorship on the platforms to national security threats and monopolistic practices.

It’s not clear that the broader public shares all of these concerns, or that the federal government is equipped to deal with them. Amazon, for instance, is the second most trusted institution in the country, after the U.S. military. Google is similarly popular.⁴

Congress, on the other hand, placed dead last in Gallup’s 2020 poll of Americans’ trust in various institutions—for the fourteenth year in a row.⁵

Politicians who are awfully serious about doing something to stop the Big Tech menace might keep in mind that Big Tech is more popular than they are. (A recent parody article in The Onion, Facebook Announces Plan to Break Up U.S. Government Before It Becomes Too Powerful, makes an all-too legitimate point.)⁶

When political figures complain that Big Tech is too powerful, the question the public should ask is: In relation to what? I’m convinced that at least part of the drive to regulate or break up tech companies stems from politicians’ concern that Big Tech’s rising influence has come at the expense of the government. Declining trust in Congress and increasing faith in large private companies is a recipe for jealousy on the part of lawmakers.

In many cases, this holds true for the mainstream media as well: Journalists at institutions like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc., were accustomed to playing an important role as gatekeepers of acceptable ideas. But the rise of social media has allowed alternate sources of information to proliferate—to the occasional alarm of legacy media companies.

The decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions, fretted New York Times tech reporter Cade Metz in a February 2021 article. And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.⁷

Metz’s implicit concern was that Silicon Valley is not restrictive enough: When Big Tech makes the rules, too much speech is within bounds.

The media freak-out over Clubhouse, an invitation-only group voice chat app that debuted in 2020 (and thus was relatively new at the time this book was written), is emblematic of the trend. As Clubhouse surged in popularity over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, mainstream journalists began to complain that it was too difficult for them to fact-check statements made by the app’s users.⁸

Unlike Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, where users leave a digital footprint in the form of text, images or videos, the conversation is wiped once a room closes, making it almost impossible to hold people accountable for their words, complained Vice magazine.⁹

It must not have occurred to Vice that this feature probably makes Clubhouse less susceptible to viral misinformation than the other mentioned platforms: Someone, somewhere is possibly saying something that’s wrong, and journalists are extremely worried you might hear it before they can protect you.

Members of the media and the politicians they cover often operate on a level of mutual distrust and hostility, but they share the impulse to be alarmed about new platforms for communicating ideas that exist beyond their control. Collectively, they are losing a struggle for relevance—and they aren’t happy about it.

I say this as a credential-carrying member of the media myself. I’m a senior editor and reporter for the magazine Reason, an award-winning libertarian publication. I broadly share the magazine’s perspective: I’m economically conservative (in the anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-market sense), and socially liberal (though skeptical of the more extreme demands of modern progressive activism).

While I’m probably best known for debunking viral media hoaxes—most notably, I was the first journalist to acquit the Covington Catholic High School students of the false smear that they had harassed a Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial¹⁰

—my main area of interest is threats to free speech. In 2019 I wrote a book called Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which surveyed the increasing hostility to the First Amendment among liberals on college campuses. Panic Attack was largely a desperate appeal to the left not to cast aside its historical commitments to free speech; Tech Panic—the book you have in your hands right now—addresses readers on all sides of the political spectrum, though several chapters are particularly interested in persuading conservatives that they should not abandon their historical skepticism of government regulation in the face of the purported Big Tech menace.

I wrote this book for three reasons: First, many of the criticisms of social media are exaggerated or flat-out wrong. I constantly encounter thunderous denunciations of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the rest on television, the radio, and in the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines. But several of these attacks on tech fall apart under scrutiny. For instance, the first chapter of this book dissects a narrative—one extremely prevalent in liberal circles—that Russian hackers’ machinations on Facebook resulted in Donald Trump winning the presidency. The fourth chapter takes issue with the moral panic about smartphone addiction being the proximate cause of a purported mental health crisis among an entire generation of teenagers.

Note that this doesn’t mean I think all criticisms of social media are off base. As a staunch supporter of free speech with a long history of First Amendment journalism and advocacy, I take very seriously the concern that tech platforms are making bad content moderation decisions. In fact, in my articles for Reason, the libertarian magazine that employs me, I have frequently called out Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others for not living up to their stated commitments to safeguard free speech.

But that brings me to the second reason I wrote this book: Many of the proposed solutions to fix social media are themselves seriously flawed. Specifically, I am not impressed by the various schemes to regulate, trust-bust, or break up the tech companies. Some of them strike me as likely to run afoul of past Supreme Court rulings, while others might backfire—or even worsen the problem they are trying to solve.

For example, Chapter Two examines the controversy over Section 230, the much-talked-about federal statute that immunizes tech platforms from some liability. This little law was so despised by Donald Trump that he vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2020 because it did not include a provision to repeal Section 230. What many backers of the president might not realize is that repealing Section 230 is also a top priority of Warren, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and even President Joe Biden. Why? Because they know that without Section 230, social media would become a more hostile place for conservatives.

It’s true that in January 2021—at the very end of his presidency—years of provocative tweets (some of them arguably in violation of Twitter’s terms of service) finally caught up with Trump: Both Twitter and Facebook banned him from their platforms following the January 6 Capitol riots. The companies claimed that Trump’s statements on social media carried a risk of inflaming further violence—an understandable concern, given that hundreds of Trump supporters had just ransacked the Capitol Building after the president encouraged them to project strength and send a message to Vice President Mike Pence, who had the unenviable task of certifying Trump’s loss.

But the truth is that without Section 230, Twitter and Facebook might have had no choice but to ban Trump much earlier. Contrary to what Trump and many of his Republican allies seem to think, Section 230 protected the president’s tweets for years. That’s not a theoretical assertion, as the matter definitely came up in court: Anti-Trump activists sued Twitter to compel the company to take action against the president, and the company successfully used Section 230 to thwart them.

This book’s third purpose is to call attention to the considerable positives of social media. It’s not just that the criticisms of Big Tech are lazy and imprecise—the advantages of the platforms are frequently ignored by grandstanding politicians and cynical media figures.

Yes, it’s true that American society is becoming more broadly polarized, and that social media has allowed people to filter themselves into like-minded bubbles. But the echo-chambering effect of tech might not be nearly as pronounced as is popularly believed: The major platforms bring users into contact with tremendous amounts of information, not all of it ideologically reinforcing. And while ham-fisted moderation decisions frequently draw the ire of various ideological coalitions, there’s little doubt that social media has expanded the range of speech possibilities for all sides. Conservative media, for instance, has flourished on Facebook, and pro-Trump pundits have for years drawn massive audiences because of the platform’s reach. At the same time, progressive activist groups have harnessed the amazing organizational powers of social media to launch movements and change the world.

Social media has fostered political movements ranging from the nascent to the national to the international, wrote Neil Chilson and Casey Mattox in an essay for Columbia University’s Knight Institute. The Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, and the Parkland kids’ gun control movement all originated online and grew through social media. Other examples of social media–driven movements include the Arab Spring uprisings as well as the recent Hong Kong protests.¹¹

While there was precious little for which to be thankful during the annus horribilis that was 2020, I for one don’t even want to contemplate how much harder and lonelier things would have been without Skype, Instagram, or Amazon. The backlash against tech—or techlash as some call it—seems particularly silly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; in a year when the government made it illegal to gather in groups, go to the bar, or see a movie with friends, we should all be more than a little grateful that we possess so many virtual methods of staying in touch. It’s true that Zoom events are no proper substitute for in-person events, and I will be thrilled to attend (one day soon, I hope) my very last conference, birthday party, or happy hour on a laptop screen. But at a time when protecting the very lives of the vulnerable and the elderly meant minimizing contact with other human beings, social media was a saving grace. For months, it was the only form of socialization available to many people all over the world.

According to surveys, the pandemic has caused people to value social media more than they did previously. An April 2020 study by the National Research Group found that 88 percent of respondents increased their appreciation for social media in light of COVID-19.¹²

The entire ‘techlash’ framing is seeming more absurd by the day, wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis. Just a couple of months ago, anti-tech activists and politicians were complaining that America’s tech titans were monopolists who provided us little real value. Now we wonder how we would’ve survived had a pandemic struck in the pre-FAANG era. (FAANG is an acronym that refers to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.)¹³

Yes, it’s true that the fact we were all stuck at home in front of our screens for so long was a boon to the business model of Big Tech. Amazon, in particular, saw revenue grow 37 percent in 2020; this is hardly surprising, given Amazon is the company that makes it trivially easy to buy things without going to the store.¹⁴

In any case, it’s foolish to assume that a company making money during a crisis is necessarily a bad thing: We should be glad that there’s a profit motive for companies to provide people with services that mitigate the awfulness of the crisis. Like it or not, that’s capitalism: The alternative is vast, clueless government bureaucracies struggling and failing to meet people’s needs. (At the time this section of the book was being written, the federal government had still not yet managed to approve a coronavirus vaccine that is already known to be safe in the