Can breaking up big tech firms tackle disinformation and hate speech?

Our newsletter, The Counterbalance, is carrying an article on this topic today.

Some people may imagine that breakups are about smashing giant firms into smithereens, pitching the pieces into a mad, heartless neoliberal competitive race to the bottom. They may think of Mickey Mouse as the hapless sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia: he brings to life a magic broom to fetch water but when it runs amok he splits it into pieces -  then faces a worse problem, as many smaller magic brooms create pandemonium.

Instead of breaking up dominant firms, many argue, do something else instead: regulate, build collaborative alternatives, pay workers properly, nationalise them, enforce privacy rules, and so on. And, adding to this, regulators since the 1980s have fallen under a pro-monopoly ideology that has rendered breakups all but taboo.

Yet breakups are not an either/or proposition. In fact, smart breakups can make all these other essential approaches easier.  

It’s better to see breakups as a Swiss Army knife: they can be used to pursue many different goals, in many different ways.

To see a powerful surgical intervention to tame disinformation and toxic content, read the rest of the article here.

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