By Luigi Zingales/ Chicago
After being celebrated for playing a central role in the Arab Spring, social-media platforms are now blamed for any outcome that traditional media outlets dislike – from the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election to political polarisation more generally. Growing disenchantment with social media has led to growing demands for regulation. The pressure is now great enough that Facebook, fearful of being shackled by the state, has sought to lead the regulatory effort itself, advertising heavily to express its own support for such policies.
But what type of regulation do we need? To answer that question, we first must appreciate the transformational nature of social media, which is arguably comparable to that of the printing press in 15th-century Europe.
Before the printing press, books were unaffordable, and their production had to be subsidised by the Catholic Church, which thus maintained a monopoly over knowledge. But once the printing press arrived, books become affordable for the merchant class.
The printing press thus changed not only the language of the books but also the style and tenor of debate. While the scholastic debates of the Middle Ages were fierce, they had always been educated and elevated in tone. But with the printing press came the Reformation, which featured theological debates full of insults and theatre. Then as now, everyone understood that highly charged intellectual wrestling would produce greater sales.
While the...
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