👍 What If Regulating Facebook Fails?

Beyond the GDPR, an even more radical and useful approach would be to throttle Facebook’s (or any company’s) ability to track everything we do and say, and limit the ways it can use our data to influence our social connections and political activities. We could limit the reach and power of Facebook without infringing speech rights. We could make Facebook matter less.

Imagine if we kept our focus on how Facebook actually works and why it’s as rich and powerful as it is. If we did that, instead of fluttering our attention to the latest example of bad content flowing across the platform and reaching some small fraction of users, we might have a chance. As Marshall McLuhan taught us 56 years ago, it’s the medium, not the message, that ultimately matters.