Does the tech sector need its own regulatory agency?

It’s a rare issue that can bring the political parties together in Congress, and the need to regulate social media companies ranks high on that very short list.

Two industry veterans want Congress to create an agency that sets safety and privacy rules for platforms — and enforces them. The status quo, they argue, is like letting airlines fly without Federal Aviation Administration oversight or the absence of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation when something goes off the rails.

The idea comes from Anika Collier Navaroli and Ellen Pao. Pao, an attorney and now CEO of Project Include, pushed to ban revenge porn on Reddit during her tenure as interim CEO. Navaroli, an attorney and senior fellow at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was involved in Twitter’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform in 2021, when she was a senior policy expert there.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Navaroli and Pao about their proposal. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Anika Collier Navaroli: There’s no safety net that is saying these are the baseline things that you at least have to have, right? Like, let’s do something like make sure that terrorist organizations are not monetizing off of content and ads. Like, it’s these very simple things that we know are possible, that we know that companies can do, that they don’t have the incentive to do but are exceedingly dangerous. We would love to see, again, the sort of external agency that has the power to do this in a bipartisan, across-the-aisle way that we can come together and have these conversations.

Ellen Pao: And when the “black box” shows information that the company knew was dangerous or risky and was negligent or grossly negligent, then there’s some accountability for the company. It’s not just, oh, you can continue doing business as usual. It’s hey, you violated the agency rules on safety, and you’re not allowed to operate this way anymore.

Lily Jamali: Is that kind of data as readily available in this milieu as it is in the aviation industry, from your experience? I’m thinking about this argument we often hear from the social media companies that there’s no conclusive evidence of harms to mental health. Compare that with something like smoking cigarettes. There are very clear data points there that show that smoking can kill you. So how difficult is it to nail down that kind of data when we’re talking about something like mental health versus physical health?

Navaroli: I think companies can do it if they want to. This is going to sound so cliched, but when there is a will, there is a way, right? Like I will say, I talk to companies and at places that shall not be named and had conversations about youth mental health and had CEOs tell me, well, there’s no youth on our service, right? It’s like, well, we can’t move forward if we’re all living in a delusion, right? And so it’s like, starting from that singular place, I think, is really, really important to be able to [recognize] that there are harms, that there are problems, right? And being able to acknowledge that enough to not even just say that they exist, but to do the research. And I think I’ve even seen, you know, research disappear or research not be done because nobody wanted it to ever be publicized in the way that, like, people know that they’re failing, and they don’t want to have the numbers and the proof to be able to say that this doesn’t exist, right? Like, I can guarantee you that there is research that has shown that there are these things out there. Has it seen the light of day? Maybe not, right?

Jamali: So what about something like the Federal Trade Commission, which is now headed by Lina Khan, of course, and she and her commission have done a lot to rein in Big Tech. Is there space for that commission to do more here?

Navaroli: I think one of the problems that we have with, like, the internet, with social media, with American technology companies, is that when everybody has jurisdiction, nobody has jurisdiction, right? And so you have the FTC, who’s able to kind of claw away over here and get a couple of pieces of things that might be happening in the antitrust world, right? Or you have, like, the [Federal Communications Commission], who might come over here and grab a couple of pieces that have to do with, like, the communication world. But Ellen and I are both lawyers, right? And so, like, the internet is like the internet, social media is like social media, AI is like AI, right? And we need to have laws and regulations that recognize that these things are unique in and of themselves. The other thing that I will say, as someone who has literally talked to a congressional committee, like more than one, I have a deep respect, as an American, for the United States Congress, and as a person who sat there and literally said, well if we choose to do nothing, violence is going to happen again. So doing nothing is not an option. I said that two years ago, and Congress has chosen to do nothing. And so I think that there is the reality of what Congress actually can and cannot do. Every single area of government has its limitations. And I think recognizing what it’s there for, what it’s good at, which is setting up entirely new regulatory bodies.

Pao: And I think the focus on safety, like consumer safety, is one that needs to be really a specialized focus. It’s hard to get to all consumer safety from an antitrust angle, right? I can prevent you from getting bigger, but that doesn’t stop you from doing harm the way you’re doing it today. And these companies are smart enough to figure out ways to expand what they’re doing without acquiring other companies if they have to.

Jamali: So what is it about the moment that we’re in now that is prompting you all to make this very public pitch about the ways that we should be regulating social media in this country?

Pao: The biggest reason we came together is, I think, this lack of progress. We haven’t witnessed any major, significant changes except in the opposite direction, and it’s also a little bit of a step of last resort. I’m not a huge believer in regulation of everything, but we’ve now witnessed we’re not getting anywhere closer, and we need something to counter the massive power and the massive influence and the complete lack of protections that are growing. It’s going in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing that’s going to be able to stop it short of regulation.

Navaroli: Yeah. I would just agree with that and say, I think for me, this is just, it’s really just looking around and saying, like, who’s going to do something? Like, this is only getting worse. It’s the next step forward along this path of technology accountability that I’ve been working in for, you know, 20 years.

More on this

Congress — let’s be honest — has its fair share of dysfunction. It’s true that widespread agreement on the need to regulate Big Tech hasn’t led to many comprehensive reforms.

But federal lawmakers do sometimes put that bipartisan sentiment to work. In 2018, they passed the law that created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security. It’s tasked with keeping the government protected from cyberattacks.

And just this year, Congress pushed through an ultimatum to force Chinese divestment from TikTok or a nationwide ban that takes effect in January if that doesn’t happen.