Social media destroys the underpinnings of American and global democracy, now is the key time to act before AI integration makes it impossible

Americans of all political persuasions are right to be concerned about unchecked social media. Manipulative social media products are robbing children of their social skills, human relationships, and childhood innocence, and our children’s mental health is at a crisis point. Our adversaries are using the online information environment to fundamentally undermine U.S. national security and attempt to weaken our bedrock principles of freedom and self-determination. Our private data is pervasively monitored, sold, and used to suck us in, keeping our attention fixed on social media platforms for profit. Social media platforms push us deeper and deeper into information silos that are not reflective of reality and divide us — at dinner tables, in the workplace, and on Capitol Hill — making political compromise a near impossibility. No democracy can survive such an assault. As an industry, social media is largely unregulated, and social media companies are free of any liability for the harms they cause. Moreover, the rise of next generation artificial intelligence (AI) will make everything that’s bad about social media worse, offering targeted opportunities for tech companies to profit from our addiction while leaving behind swaths of destruction. This isn’t a future technology crisis. It’s happening now. It’s clear the initial promises of social media are now outweighed by the harms. But this crisis can be averted. It’s time for Congress to act with legislation to tip the scale toward citizens by creating commonsense safeguards for social media companies. As a nation, we need a more responsible social media environment that supports and enhances a healthy democracy and civil society. With responsible design and operations, social media technologies can nourish, rather than erode, our society, our well-being, and our democracy. Since Facebook (now Meta) was launched in 2004, it has promised to serve as a new platform to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer.”1 Within a decade of its creation, Facebook attracted more than a billion users around the world. YouTube, Twitter (now known as X), Instagram (now owned by Meta), TikTok, and others followed, rewarding their investors with trillions of dollars, while promising to unite, inspire, and inform. Today, Meta’s market capitalization is valued at $840 billion, and the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, is $1.7 trillion. Combined, these amounts are larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of nations such as Australia, Canada, and Russia. Today, it is clear that social media has reneged on its promise. Driven by opaque algorithm-based delivery, social media has unleashed systems that are designed to reward division and outrage and undermine our trust in others and views of ourselves. In the absence of responsible safeguards, social media companies have consistently made decisions that maximize profits at all costs, leaving users with broken children, divided communities, and weakened democracies. Democracy in the United States — and around the world — is being undermined by foreign interference and the spread of false information, including deepfakes generated by bad actors, some of whom use artificial intelligence. Democracy only works with a high degree of trust in shared facts and good intentions across the aisle. Social media profits by attacking both of those. Today’s unchecked social media accelerates polarization, amplifies extremism, and challenges the rule of law. In 2016, social media was exploited and weaponized by Russia to influence our elections, fomenting widespread distrust in election results. In the 2020 elections, social media was again used to exacerbate existing tensions within our society. Those who deny the results of free and fair elections continue to cast a long shadow across our political system. Falsehoods about our electoral system have contributed to threats to poll workers and legislation that has politicized, criminalized, and interfered with elections.2 For public servants, harassment and threats have become commonplace. Their workplaces are increasingly dangerous. Content designed to divide and enrage creates toxic wedges within communities, weakening our civic bonds and leading to a generation being raised in a “post-truth” environment. Beyond the United States, social media platforms have fueled conflict resulting in atrocities, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Myanmar, Ethiopia, and other corners of the globe. Across the world, democracy is on the decline. Since 2012, when Facebook announced it had reached one billion users, the number of “free” countries that have registered overall declines in political rights and civil liberties has increased, according to the nonprofit research organization Freedom House.3 Social media is lauded for promoting freedom of expression, a hallmark of democracy. But it fails to protect privacy, doesn’t give equal weight to all voices, amplifies the most extreme content, and empowers intimidation and harassment. This cycle can fuel violence, as we saw in the United States on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists attacked the country and overran the Capitol trying to stop the counting of Electoral College votes. Generative artificial intelligence will exacerbate these harms. Earlier this year, for instance, a deepfake of an explosion at the Pentagon went viral and caused the stock market to dip.4 Our national security is under attack. Social media platforms are porous, making it easier for bad actors to access private information, track users, and spread lies. Russia has expanded its ability to unleash propaganda around the world, promoting its anti-West views on a global stage.5 Its invasion of Ukraine marked an escalation in Russia’s longstanding information operations against open democracies. TikTok, under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party, has access to a vast amount of private data, which can be used in information wars against its adversaries.6 Both internal and external bad actors continue to weaponize social media today to weaken democracy in the United States. Some social media companies continue to generate pages for terrorist groups like ISIS to use, while others direct casual social media users to the pages of extremists through their algorithms.7 Social media companies’ approach to mitigating these problems is ad hoc, at best.