Into the Metaverse

In late March, two court cases rocked the legal foundation of Silicon Valley.

At first blush, they seemed small – and in the scope of a relentless news cycle, they fell to the wayside quickly. But if these cases hold, they represent the ground falling from beneath the feet of the technology giants that have amassed unprecedented power in the modern age.

From the beginning, social media platforms were a kind of political counterweight. They allowed everyday citizens to gather and act in new ways. The law reflected that. A then-anonymous loophole in a 90s era law allowed these platforms to grow without legal risk because they played a role in making our society a better place. Now, their power outstrips that of any government they once contested.

And the law is finally catching up.

As these social media companies grew and evolved in the 2010s, they had a kind of good-natured pirate as their core character. A Jack Sparrow of the undersea cables, if not the high seas above them. Facebook and Twitter and all their various rivals and flashes-in-the-pan were building something that people loved.

It allowed people to gather and speak to one another in ways that removed geography as a barrier. It changed friendships, allowing people to stay connected across distances. But its political impact became the stuff of legend.

These platforms became a way for people to speak truth to power. Their gatherings becoming a common prayer, hitched together by an almost metaphysical element built by these companies that saw themselves as the connectors of a modern humanity.

This was Bay Area libertarianism at its best, to say that the people empowered should be able to contest any government, anywhere.

By and large, the country agreed. The genius of the American political system is that it does not easily allow unchecked power – a premise obviously and actively being tested by Donald Trump every day. But these platforms fit nicely into that self-image. Technology could be harnessed to make a more democratic world.

As is often the case, the legal system reflected the attitudes of the time. The law itself is a malleable thing, constantly being redefined with the times. The same laws that are used to oppress one group a century ago may be used to free them today.

Perhaps our most fundamentalist clerics, like Pete Hegseth or the Ayatollahs against whom he fights, would do well to remember that.

These cases, decided in two courts against both Meta and YouTube, show that change in thinking. After nearly two weeks of deliberation in one case, both Meta and Google were found to have been negligent in designing and operating their platform.

The case rested on the idea that the platforms were aware that the content they hosted could be a danger to minors, whom they are statutorily obliged to protect.

The other case, against Meta specifically, also found that the platform misled users about the safety of their platforms – and that in itself led to the possibility of sexual exploitation of minors.

Courts, as mirrors of the society they judge, have for a generation now offered protection to social media platforms emergent from a singular section (Section 230) of the Communications Act, updated in 1996, which exempts from liability platforms which publish user-generated content.

Neither of these cases were tied to any specific piece of content, but rather the entire structure of the organization that build a pipeline that fed directly into the brains of their end users, creating a product so addictive and misleading that harm would be inevitable.

The law was explicitly written at the time to foster the development of the internet in the United States, and to see it as a transformative technology that could revitalize democracy in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union – back when we had won the Cold War.

The harm that society imagined at the time was being done by an overreaching government, and digital platforms provided an antidote to that. Platforms could bring greater accountability and visibility to wrongdoing.

That the courts have ruled against these platforms should not be surprising. They are now among the most powerful actors in our society. The boygeniuses who lead them are some of the select few chosen to have a front-row seat of a Presidential inauguration moved indoors to avoid the shame of a poorly attended crowd. The algorithms they have created now dominate our daily lives, and the decisions that these men make govern war and peace in the modern age.

In other words, they are now the source of power. Their transformation has been rapid and nearly complete. Social media now constitutes the primary source of information for most people in the Western world. Much like the ancient kings who controlled the flow of rivers and streams to direct the very possibility of life in their fiefdoms, so too do the kings of Silicon Valley yank at the ways in which our information flows. They can breathe life to their favored sons, and they can, by commission or omission, condemn an entire country to civil war.

These companies have become the goliaths they thought they had slain. To continue to protect them would be to offer protection to power rather than challenging it.

We are seeing for the first time democratic societies willing to renegotiate their position with these companies they had fostered.

Australia, Denmark, and others have enacted social media bans for teenagers. Regardless of the specifics, these mark the first time that democratic governments have clawed back the open field they had offered freely. These court cases reflect the same change – that enough people had become tired and disillusioned with a power they could not even fathom, let alone contest.

Perhaps this is a momentary blip. A small bubble of air in a churning sea that will eventually consume us all, the oligarchs of the modern age willing to consume us in their ever-engorged hunt for greater wealth and power.

Or this is a galvanizing moment. One in which we could take heart in the possibility that these platforms are not all-powerful, but that we can still find ourselves in control of them rather than the other way around.

To contain these platforms and to be able to use them without being overrun, our humanity handed off to an algorithm, will require yet another common prayer. The act of reigniting the promise of democracy often comes in the face of a mortal threat.

Perhaps it is always the great irony of such invasions that the would-be conquerors lay the seeds of their own eventual defeat when they remind those they threaten of the stakes. And give them the very tools they need to fight back.