I'm all on board for breaking up big tech--a first step is making Facebook divest from Instagram and Whatsapp--but I think we'll have met the moment when we stop big tech from being both players in the game and the referees. Let me elaborate: (thread)

Amazon, for instance, is both a marketplace for selling products as well as a creator of products. They are able to prioritize their own products in search results and set prices for their products at what I assume are net losses, because they earn it back from other sources

Amazon either should have to 1. give up control of their marketplace algorithm, 2. give up manufacturing products, or if they refuse to do option 1 or 2., 3. stop being a marketplace for products besides their own.

Why is it fundamentally a monopoly? Amazon is basically THE marketplace to go to for online purchases. Small businesses who want to sell their product online face the fact that Amazon is gets the most traffic, but Amazon also decides how the algorithm sorts search results...

and Amazon can also decide to make their own, cheaper version of your successful product, thus undercutting your business. If you choose not to sell on Amazon, though, you are missing out on a huge marketplace of online buyers, who go nowhere else to shop

that's too much power for one company to have. Facebook also has too much power--even setting aside Instagram and Whatsapp for now. Facebook decides in their algorithms what information you will see, in order to keep you engaged and viewing ads

They give you the illusion of control--you pick your friends, you decide which pages to like, but the order and priority of the posts you see is fully determined by facebook's goal of keeping you tuned in to their website. They prioritize echo-chambers.

So, what effect does this have on the real world? Well, imagine you have a friend on FB that believes in the election conspiracy. facebook reinforces that, giving them more election conspiracy content to share. However, you, being a responsible adult, try to debunk it in a post

your friend may never see your post, because facebook's filters decided that what you wrote is not something that your friend should see or interact with, so it sunk it way down in their feed.

Imagine a TV service that only lets you watch the channels it tells you to watch.

that's basically what Facebook is. You pick the channels you initially want, but then it decides which ones you should watch, and then hides the other ones from your view. The decisions aren't made for your own good, or for the quality of the content. It's motivated by watch time

All this is to say, I think the FCC should up its enforcement of social media and treat it more like traditional media, because they are not fundamentally different. And currently, social media is flat out dangerous in how it can connect bad actors with one another

Social media companies have grown so powerful so quickly, that policy and regulation haven't had a chance to catch up to protect consumers