California must stand up to big tech and tackle disinformation crisis hurting Latinos most
For decades, Californians have prided ourselves as global leaders in technology and innovation. The culture of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and the rise of tenacious start-ups have largely been a boon to the state. At the same time, the past year has demonstrated the destructive power of online disinformation if social media companies are left to make their own rules.
To maintain our role as a leader, California must move beyond simply celebrating technology and social media companies and toward regulating them to promote an equitable, safe online environment.
From the rampant spread of online disinformation about COVID-19 to conspiracy theories about election results; efforts to suppress voters; online hate speech inciting violence, anti-Semitism and vitriol aimed at women, large social media companies have allowed the online world to become overrun with deception and manipulation — much of which targets Latino, Black and Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Combined, those groups represent roughly 60% of Californians. To fix the problem, we need more transparency about how social media companies moderate content and more laws that hold these companies accountable.
False information about COVID-19 has plagued social media platforms since the pandemic began, with pages spreading COVID misinformation drawing an estimated 460 million views in April of 2020 alone. More recently, Facebook and other large social media companies largely ignored conspiracy theories and misinformation in Spanish about COVID vaccines. After the election, YouTube videos promoting electoral disinformation drew more than 100 million views in a single week. And on Jan. 6, we witnessed the awful power of disinformation amplified online when a mob stormed the Capitol Building.
At the federal level, lawmakers are beginning to recognize that curbing online disinformation must be a top priority, but so far Congress has yet to pass any meaningful reforms. That’s why it’s critical for our state to show leadership that other states and the federal government can follow before our democracy suffers a fatal blow.
In particular, California’s robust Latino population — which comprises nearly 40% of the state — makes it all the more imperative to have strong regulations to limit online disinformation campaigns which have disproportionately targeted communities of color. So far, major social media platforms like Facebook have utterly failed to combat Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.
Facebook has allowed translation errors that fail to account for slang, dialects and context; conducted poor fact-checking of Spanish-language news sites and permitted extensive misinformation targeting Spanish speakers. Despite attending several meetings with civic organizations representing California’s Latino community, Facebook has failed to meet reasonable requests to protect Spanish speaking users.
To begin to address the problem, one promising proposal in California is the Social Media Transparency and Accountability Act of 2021, or Assembly Bill 587, recently introduced by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, D-Woodland Hills. The bill creates clear guidelines requiring online platforms to disclose their policies and enforcement regarding online hate, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign interference.
By demanding transparency into what the platforms are — and are not — doing when it comes to content moderation, we can increase public trust and engender more awareness by tech companies about the deceptive and harmful activity on their platforms. We won’t be able to end the crisis of online disinformation with any single bill, but passing the Social Media Transparency and Accountability Act would mark an important first step in tackling this existential threat to our democracy.
As Californians, we’ve never been afraid to lead. With the health of our democracy on the line, now is not the time to sit back and hope for the best.