Regulating the Feed

Take a video with your phone of something you’re doing right now. If you show it to a person you don’t know, they’ll likely still reflexively believe that it happened. However, with AI image and video generators becoming increasingly realistic and easy to access, we are losing this medium, which has helped create a shared baseline of facts that for decades has held the people’s shared understanding of US and world politics together. This alone is a serious problem, but it is even more concerning when coupled with the recent shifts in news distribution.

For much of US history, there was no widely distributed medium, such as photos and videos, that news sources and people could inherently believe in, so we had to foster a shared baseline of facts through legislation and regulation. The distribution networks fostered by regulation created a shared understanding of what events were happening in the world so that the electorate could make informed decisions at the polls. Today, we are seeing a silent compression of news distributors similar to the advent of previous technologies, and, as before, we must regulate the distribution networks to ensure there is a relatively accurate shared baseline of facts across citizens.

The original expansive news distribution network in the US came from the United States Postal Service (USPS). It was founded in 1775, but the pivotal moment for this story is in 1792 when the Postal Service Act was passed, setting the postage rate of newspaper delivery at 1 cent (compared to 6 to 25 cents for sending letters) and allowing newspaper publishers to send one newspaper to any other publishers for free. This meant that newspaper publishers in Georgia could easily clip a story from a paper in Massachusetts, or a Kentucky paper could quickly reprint a congressional speech in Philadelphia. This effectively created a decentralized news network where papers across the country got their sources from many other similar newspapers that would write using primary sources as well as clippings from other papers. 

However, despite the decentralized nature of the news, reporting was not “objective.” There was intense spin on events in most papers, but the critical component of the USPS-based news system was that people were generally arguing over a shared set of facts. Federalist newspapers might tear down a Jefferson speech that was sent to them by another paper, but they would still cover these important political events. The vast network and availability of the USPS-powered news hit full stride in the 1830s, when newspapers made up 95% of the mail by weight that was sent around the country.

The first technology that challenged this state of news collection and distribution was the telegraph (patented by Samuel Morse in 1840). During the early stages of telegraph adoption, newspapers would send out field reporters to various locations who would “compete” to be the earliest to send breaking news back to their paper via telegraph. However, after a while, newspapers realized that they could work together to get guaranteed access to telegraphs and share relevant information between papers, similar to how papers would clip from publications in other towns. Now, events could be mentioned in a paper when they happened, instead of waiting to get published copies of papers spread between journalists via the USPS. Newspapers refocused on analysis as a differentiating factor, as the speed and distribution of world events to newspapers was once again democratized as a shared baseline of facts. The distribution of input stories between newspapers was limited by the capacity and availability of the telegraph for journalists (who secured special access to telegraph lines), but during this era, the distribution of news to the people was still unencumbered, as all news was printed by many publishers and distributed in hard copies by the cheap and readily available USPS.

When radio showed up and started to be favored as the medium for news transmission to the people, a new problem emerged with distribution that ultimately demanded legislation. The airwaves could only carry so many signals, which meant that a limited number of broadcasters would control the whole flow of information to the common citizen. Congress recognized the problem with a limited number of distributors controlling the news output, so they passed the Radio Act of 1927, which established that broadcasters could only use airwaves under license and only if they served “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Critically, the act also established that all candidates for the same office must be offered equal time on a radio station. This ensured that despite the limited number of distributors, the radio-powered distribution of news operated on a common fact basis for major votes at the polls.

By the late 1940s, television started to take off as the dominant medium of news transmission, and the issues that came with a limited number of distributors in radio were even more pronounced for television. Instead of the hundreds of radio stations, there were now only a few broadcasters who made it onto the television set in most homes: ABC, NBC, and CBS. As a result of the shrinking distribution channels, Congress passed a more restrictive bill in 1949 called the Fairness Doctrine. Licensed TV broadcasters were now forced to cover controversial public issues and give equal time on the air to both sides of the aisle. Now, more than ever before in US history, there was a shared baseline of not only facts but also analysis. In many ways, the political scene was kept artificially tame by the bipartisan requirements for TV broadcasters.

As more TV broadcasters came online and TV sets weren’t limited to just ABC, NBC, and CBS, a Reagan-stacked FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Congress passed a new bill called the Fairness Broadcasting Act of 1987 in response with a 302-102 vote in the House and a 59-31 margin in the Senate, but Reagan vetoed the bill, killing the age of bipartisan news channels.

For many years, the free market ideology for media that Reagan promoted worked more or less as he intended. Because there were many distributors on TV and a shared baseline of facts, driven by photos and videos as an all but undeniable conveyor of facts, the American electorate remained informed about the major events impacting the US.

In recent years, though, Reagan’s vision has fallen apart due to a couple of converging factors that have caused significant changes to the news distribution network. The primary change impacting the distribution of news is the adoption of social media as the main channel of news consumption for Gen Z and Millennials. Similar to the advent of TV as the main source of news, there are a handful of social media companies that control the feeds of almost every American in these younger generations: Meta, Google, ByteDance, and X. Most users exclusively scroll through their feeds aggregated by these four tech company, effectively giving control of the public sentiment to the tech companies who choose what stories to push. On this basis alone, it should be obvious that we need to legislate a required bipartisan feed output on major social media platforms, similar to what we did during the early TV era. Due to the limited number of distributors, we need to ensure that both sides of the aisle get a comparable quantity of items pushed to each user's feed. Writing legislation that carries this out effectively will undoubtedly be challenging, but avoiding this responsibility causes a disproportionate distribution of power to a small set of executives sitting on the board of major social media companies. 

For most of the internet’s history we have viewed social media platforms as infrastructure that allows people to share their thoughts and experiences freely. But, with the addition of strong targeted algorithms focusing on driving engagement and the lack of any shared baseline of facts, videos and photos once provided, the limited number of social media companies should be seen in a similar light to the original TV broadcasters. These major social media platforms are aggregators of information with the power to completely change the political leanings of users. Social media platforms are now the dominant medium for younger people to gather their news, and we have seen countless examples of the power they have to sway public sentiment. Take the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018 as an example. YouTube was more widely watched than all but one TV channel at the time, and it was found to have disproportionately pushed users towards far-right channels, such as the one run by Bolsonaro. These social media platforms have been shown to push extreme political view points en masse in a way that influences elections. Their power is real, and we need to ensure it doesn’t artificially sway the understanding of the electorate in the US.

Just because citizens can find sources outside of social media on the internet, on the TV, over the radio, or in print does not mean we should avoid legislating the distribution of political information pushed on social media “for you” pages or in feeds. When radio became popular, there were still many newspapers people could choose to read. When TV was adopted as the primary method to ingest news, radio and print were still widely available. Despite there being other avenues for the people to learn about political events, it is necessary for legislators to regulate the newer distribution networks when they are controlled by a select few companies (such as with radio and TV).

The combination of a handful of news aggregators/distributors pushing partisan content and the lack of a shared baseline of facts has never occurred for an extended period of time in the US before. When the radio was limited to hundreds of channels, we ensured that political candidates got equal time. When the TV was limited to a few broadcasters, we legislated stringent guidelines to ensure that the average American would be informed and see both sides of an issue. With social media becoming the new dominant news distribution network, we must follow the precedent set in previous generations to ensure our electorate stays informed. Regulating the distribution of news often feels anti-American, but countless generations before us have faced a similar question and decided that a shared base line of facts is a must for both sides of the aisle to have productive political discussions and deliberations.