Top 5 Tech Policy Predictions for 2020 - Morning Consult

Potential election interference

During the 2016 presidential election, as many as 126 million American Facebook Inc. users were exposed to Russian-backed content, the company told a Senate Judiciary panel in 2017. Heading into 2020, social media companies are still scrambling to prevent repeating the spread of coordinated, inauthentic campaigns that plagued the last U.S. presidential election.

But if research from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization released earlier this month is any indicator, it’s still an uphill battle. In the study, researchers bought engagement on 105 different posts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Inc., and Google-owned YouTube through social media manipulation services based in Russia, Poland, Germany, France and Italy. Four weeks later, the posts were still online.

Chris Calabrese, interim co-chief executive and vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that while he does believe companies are trying to combat misinformation, “I just don’t think we’ve gotten to a point yet where we have good solutions or a good understanding of how we’re going to solve these problems.”

Calabrese anticipates more academic research being conducted to find the answer to those questions — including which social media company’s election ads policy best reduces misinformation tactics — but said it’s hard to say now what exact impact interference could have on the 2020 elections.

Tech antitrust

As the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission and House lawmakers continue their antitrust reviews of the technology industry, with conclusions to some of those investigations expected in 2020, Calabrese said regulators will ramp up their efforts by taking action against a company beyond just opening probes.

“Sometimes, there’s a little bit of a misapprehension that tech is somehow immune from antitrust laws,” said Calabrese, who added that the idea that a free online product is not subject to antitrust law is “just not true.” “Given some of the bottlenecking in Congress, it makes sense that you might see the regulators get impatient and consider a lawsuit against a tech company.”

But Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of industry group NetChoice, which typically doesn’t support antitrust actions against large tech companies, sees the continued interest in antitrust as more of a political tool, saying that once someone pulls back the layers of an argument for breaking up big tech companies, there’s nothing substantial there.

“Once you take more than a knee-jerk analysis of the digital landscape, you realize that there are a lot of competitors out there, that choice is robust and there is no consumer harm,” he said.