The history of American innovation is generally one of people inventing things that the status quo ignores until either the money becomes too big or the status quo feel threatened, or both. At which point the cops are called in to straighten this shit out.
Often this is done under the auspices of protecting the goodness and purity of society. Sometimes it actually is. Sometimes it’s just a cash grab.
We could probably argue endlessly about why social media has never been subjected to this exercise but I think we can all agree that 1) it hasn’t been, 2) what we now have can generously be described as a shitshow and 3) anyone who might straighten it out is either too ignorant, too craven, or too cowardly to do so. So no one does, complaining that “it’s too damn complicated” before quickly moving on to argue about bathrooms.
But I would like to suggest a solution that you may dismiss as being at once too simple as well as exactly the nail you’d expect from this particular man with a hammer.
Reclassify all social media as advertising.
Not as advertising agencies, mind you. But as advertising.
Wait, what?
Look, it is common knowledge that facebook, Instagram, youtube, twitter (I mean, x), and whatever has popped up since I started writing this essay, make their money from actual advertising. (If you inherently distrust the words “common knowledge”– as well you probably should – then read this and this and this and this). Companies large and small pay actual advertising agencies to make actual ads that they then pay actual social media platforms to make show up in your actual feeds and streams. Sure, sure, some social media companies also make money from other things – subscriptions and data selling, for example – but if you took away their advertising, they would implode financially and would have to go to a subscription model, which many of the moguls admit would reduce their revenue drastically. So I don’t see them doing that. Ever. Thus, realistically, and for the foreseeable future, the only way they exist is because of advertising. So…
But there’s another good reason to think of them this way that goes beyond the purely commercial component. And it has to do with how consumers – you know, actual people like you and me - actually use social media.
Because even we use it as advertising. We use it to advertise ourselves. To advertise where we are, what we believe, who we love, who we hate, what we’re doing, eating, buying, seeing. No? Well, then what would you call the vast majority of posts – journalism? Certainly not. Art? Oh honey, please. No, we are using the “free” media (although we could get into an argument about how “free” it is when we’re all “paying” for it with our data – but let’s leave that for another essay) to promote ourselves in some form or another. If we weren’t, influencers wouldn’t be a thing, now would they? (And by and large they weren’t, until social media showed up)
This is how social media is distinguished from, say, newspapers or magazines, which have actual content about something other than ads for itself or the reader in it. Or a tv show that again has content that is distinguished from the ads. The whole reason for being of social media is advertising. By users, by corporations, by advertising agencies. By everyone.
All I’m suggesting is that we stop pretending it isn’t.
Let’s call it what it is, hand out copies of the FTC rules and regulations (especially the ones about claim substantiations, health benefit claims, and disclosures), and tell social media companies that if they don’t comply, they’ll be correspondingly punished - just like the FTC does with corporations and advertising agencies. Like when Kubota lied in their advertising about their machines being made in the US. Or when Kohls lied that their fabrics were made from bamboo when they actually, um, weren’t. Or, when TurboTax misused the word “free”.
Now, you may argue – and I believe the standard argument has been – that social media are just the vehicle, and that only the actual purveyors of the lies should be the ones regulated. You know, the actual corporation or person or entity who made the post and put it up on facebook. I think this is the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” defense.
Unfortunately, if that were a legitimate tack, then advertising agencies would have been using it for decades - “we didn’t know it was a lie, we were just following orders”. But that’s not how the FTC looks at it. As the law firm Veneble LLP writes:
“Generally speaking, any party involved in the ‘creation’ of a marketing claim is open to liability regardless of the primary source of the product’s advertisement. This means that many parties (including producers, endorsers, advertising agencies, companies that review and approve distributor advertising and product inventors) have been held liable under the theory that they were involved in the creation of the advertisement.”
Because a social media post does not exist until it shows up on social media (unlike a television commercial that exists before it hits our screens or a radio spot before a station airs it), and since, as we’ve described above, the primary function of social media is advertising (that is, unlike newspapers, magazines, tv shows, etc, they do not create “content” that is “not-advertising”), it seems to me that under this test they would be liable.
Which, of course, could open them up to being sued by everyone who took issue with everything they posted. Just like ad agencies are for every ad they create.
Social media’s remedies for this could be several. They could verify the claims of everyone posting on their sites. They could refuse to post that which they could not verify. They could sue for damages anyone who posted things that they themselves were fined or penalized for. (I’m sure there are more options – these are just three that I, a simple copywriter, came up with. I’m certain that the lawyers of social media moguls could come up with many more. If they can’t, however, I’m happy to help them. For a fee…)
Undoubtedly, social media companies will claim that such verification is too onerous. That the sheer number of posts they process is too many. But breaking the law just because it’s too hard not to break the law is rarely a winning defense.
And anyway, I’m not sure it is too hard. Global holding companies – WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and anyone else who hasn’t merged into itself yet – have been doing it across nations and brands for literally decades. Because they’ve had to. So maybe they can lend a hand.
And how crazy would it be that the very same global holding companies who are the bazillion dollar customers of social media, whose ads are sitting cheek by jowl with spurious claims that diminish the validity of their own ads, and who are “concerned” about the validity of social media metrics (and thus the fees they are being charged), might be the very ones to untangle social media and disinformation?
And to do it without resorting to censorship and new regulations. To do it by using democracy and capitalism to fix a problem of, well, democracy and capitalism. And in the process, maybe even providing some revenue to the government, to defray costs.
Why, it would almost be like two wrongs making a right.
Honest.
Note: in this essay, I link to two law firm websites and quote one of them within the text. This should in no way be construed as legal advice by these firms, nor as their endorsement of my hare-brained ideas. And hopefully that’s enough to keep me from getting sued by them.