WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: Garion Frankel

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Education policy expert Garion Frankel joins WRFH to discuss an article that ran in the Washington Examiner arguing that regulation of social media companies by the federal government isn't the right idea.

You are listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Maddie Grace Watson, and today I will be interviewing Garyan Frankel, who is a PhD student in PK12 Education Administration at Texas A&M University. Recently, he published an article with the Washington Examiner titled, Congress Can't Be Trusted to Manage Big Tech, but States Can. His work primarily focuses on education. policy, American history, and political philosophy, as well as where those subjects intersect. His works have been published additionally in local, state, national, and academic publications,

including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the American Institute for Economic Research. He was previously an education reporter for chalkboard review. Mr. Frenkel, thank you so much for joining us here today. In your recent article for the Washington Examiner, you talk about a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing involving some top social media CEOs. What exactly was the goal of this hearing for the Senate? Well, the goal of the Senate hearing depends on who you ask. Officially, the goal was to hold major social media platforms accountable for what many legislators claim is insufficient protection of children in their various

activities online, because anybody who spends any length of time on the internet knows at least two dozen horror stories about some of the negative things that children have experienced. On the other hand, the way the Senate hearing was treated was essentially as a campaign stop for a lot of legislators to demonstrate in a very public fashion how committed they are of solving this problem and how good they look and how they're holding these tech companies accountable without any real implications for policy. Now, did Congress promote, like, did they have a bill or something that they're offering up as kind of a counter to this? Or is there, are they just trying to address the problem? There is a bill that is making the rounds. I think it was Tom Cotton

that proposed it, though. Don't quote me on that. It's called the protection. It's called the protection. Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. And what the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act does is that it orders social media platforms to, quote, take reasonable steps beyond merely requiring attestation, taking into account existing Vage verification technologies, end quote, in order to prevent minors under the age of 13 from accessing the platform. There's also a similar approach within the legislation that would also restrict social media usage of teenagers, but they get a little bit of more leeway. Now, you mentioned in your quote from the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act that they're looking into existing age verification technologies. Do they have examples of these things? Or is that what's their aim with that? Well, that's part of the problem,

is that they don't provide any examples of existing age verification technologies. They don't provide examples of reasonable steps on the part of social media platforms to protect kids online would look like. And they don't seem, and they meaning Congress, don't seem particularly interested

in specified what any of these things mean. And in context, that's not particularly surprising because Congress has a track record going back five or ten years of having a very difficult time explaining to people even what the Internet is and the very basic functions of what it does.

There was a case a couple years ago of an elected official. I don't remember who it was. asking META to regulate Finsta, having no idea that a Finsta was just a person's private Instagram account. So it's stuff like that that really decreases the trust that the American people have in Congress to regulate social media platforms properly because, well, if they don't understand what a Finsta is, or if they think that a Finsta is something that should be regulated,

how are they going to understand the landscape for age verification technology that would not be overly burdensome, not only to the social media platforms themselves, but to adults who have every right to use those social media platforms in the way that they see fit. Now, regardless of like the scale that Congress understands social media, do you believe that this is a federal issue or is it something that should belong more on the, the state scale there? I don't think that it's a federal issue, or at least not exclusively a federal issue, because I think that states have an opportunity. You have the old saying that you learn

in a government class in high school that states can institute policy on an experimental basis, and so that one state can try something, is an experiment, and if it works, then other states can start to replicate it, or if it doesn't work, then other states know not to replicate it. But even beyond sort of that AP government level of content, there is an argument that states having legislatures that are often, especially when you start combining them all, you have a much larger pool of legislators than you do in the U.S. state legislatures are usually younger than Congress and may have more people who have a better understanding of how social media works. And I think that states are also much better prepared to institute reforms than the federal government. Those reforms won't take as long. They have

an opportunity to be much more narrow and deliberate. And that states have, a better chance of ensuring that a lot of these regulations and reforms actually stick before, instead of becoming a judicial and bureaucratic quagmire, which almost any federal legislation probably would be. It'd be immediately sued into oblivion and perhaps rightfully so. So I think if states are smart about how they regulate social media companies, then they have an opportunity to circumvent some of those issues. Now, are we seeing states attempting to start making these regulations yet, or is that something that we're looking to in the future? Well, states are already taking action to regulate social media companies, but they're doing so

in two very distinct approaches. The first approach is very similar to what is very similar to what the federal government has tried to do. To use a baseball analogy, the federal government has taken a big old swing and tried to hit a home run. But instead of hitting the home run, they just repeatedly swung and missed. States like Texas and Utah, which are trying to implement very, very restrictive legislation without the specifics needed to supplement those very specific pieces of legislation, are having the same problems that the federal government is. The regulations are not taking hold the way the states would hope.

They're not actually protecting kids, and they had just been sued into oblivion. However, instead of trying to score the run by hitting a big old home run, what a lot of other states are trying to do is string together a few singles and hope that they can eventually score the run. And even if it's a slower and less satisfying process, they're eventually more likely to score that run. And some states that have done stuff like that are not your usual suspects.

I mean, I'm normally the last person to say anything nice about public policy in California. But California has done a very good job of setting guidelines for child protection on social media platforms without explicitly telling the platforms how to comply with those guidelines. So California's role in the regulatory process is to ensure results, and they can hold social media platforms accountable if they don't meet those results, but they're not micromanaging how those social media platforms do their jobs. Virginia is another

state with some very good policy on that front, and that they've expanded the ability to of law enforcement agencies within the state, as well as a lot of nonprofit organizations that are working within the state to collaborate with social media platforms in order to ensure children's online safety. New York is going a step further in that department where they're giving a commission

to study online human trafficking, especially among children. legal authority to start prosecuting people if they commit these sorts of infractions. And New York has also expanded their authority to work with social media platforms in order to crack down on this type of horrible activity online. So what does that mean in practice? It means more comprehensive guidelines and best practices for concerned parents. and it means a lot more transparency between platforms and uses.

And I think most importantly, it gives the government greater latitude to create sting operations that can catch bad guys before they even have the opportunity to hurt any kids online. And I think in the long run, these types of approaches will be much more successful than trying to hit the home run of this nationwide plan that tries to ultra-regulate social media companies without providing any details on how to do so. If you were just now tuning in, this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM,

and we are interviewing Gary and Frankel right now on a recent article he wrote for the Washington Examiner about Senate Judiciary Committee hearings involving social media company regulations in regards to minors. Now, are CEOs of these social media companies? Are they being cooperative with lawmakers, both on the federal and state levels, or are we seeing a little bit of resistance there? That's a good question. I think it oftentimes depends on how the federal government is trying to work with them.

Because if you watch the Senate hearings and really any of the Senate hearings over the past few years, you can clearly see that, you can clearly see that, the CEOs are very frustrated. And to a certain extent, I don't blame them for being frustrated because these Senate hearings generally devolve into performances rather than a substantive discussion or even robust questioning about what's actually happening on social media platforms. On the other hand, I think those CEOs should also know why they're there and not bait into the questioning as often as they do, so everybody's in fault. But when regulations are legitimately substantive, when they're fair, and when they're pointed, I think social media platforms and their CEOs in particular are a lot more. cooperative because when you look at it from a policing or a criminal justice standpoint, a lot of social media platforms are always happy to coordinate with police departments to run a sting,

especially if those police departments have evidence that that platform is being used to conduct human or child trafficking operations. So I think it just depends on the approach. I think it depends on both sides of that dispute being willing to sit in a table and hash things out with each other rather than performing for the masses online. So it's very situation, context, and location dependent. Are any of these social media companies taking steps to institute these regulations independently, or is it mostly in cooperation with these state lawmakers? A lot of social media platforms talk a lot of game about instituting these regulations independently. But in the end, I think that more often than not, it really has to be state lawmakers that get the ball rolling.

This has been the case with Facebook in particular and then TikTok, especially with its, connections to the Chinese Communist Party have been extremely uncooperative with almost any time of any type of regulation, no matter how often they talk about welcoming this sort of regulation from the United States, they're not. So in many cases, I think the state does have to sort of step in because, I mean, nobody wants to, nobody likes regulating themselves unless they have to. that takes a lot of money in time. And I think at this point it is somewhat necessary for states to step in in at least some capacity. Now, we're a couple weeks past this hearing now that the Senate Judiciary Committee had.

And how do you see the conclusions or the results of what they came to in that hearing playing out over the next couple of months? Do you think anything will happen with it? or do you think it will mostly keep staying on that state level? Well, Congress could always surprise me, but I sincerely doubt that anything will come of those hearings. I don't think that the protecting kids on social media act is going to go anywhere, at least in the short term. I doubt it'll get to a vote even.

I doubt it would get through the House. and I'm not sure the president would sign it. And really, the hearings are just very periodic and serve to generate Twitter discussions more than anything else, or I should say X discussions. So if there is going to be any movement over the next several months, well, a lot of state legislatures aren't in session right now, but for those that are, if there's going to be any movement at all, I would expect to see that movement there rather than within Congress as a direct result of the hearings a couple weeks ago.

Mr. Frankel, thank you so much for joining us here today. And thank you all for joining us as we embarked on this conversation today regarding the Senate Judiciary Committee and all the social media regulations that are flying around the country right now. You are listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. And my name is Maddie Grace Watson. Have a wonderful day.