It’s Not Too Late for Tech Companies to Spill Their Secrets

Keeping track of tech policy debates in the U.S. was an almost impossible task in 2021. Well-intentioned government inquiries into privacy and competition got dragged into the culture wars, triggering a lot of high-drama political theater and very little sensible legislating.

The chaos has its roots in 2016, when then–presidential candidate Donald Trump began using allegations of political bias on social media to rally his supporters. Companies knew his accusation—that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were systematically censoring conservatives on their platform—didn’t make sense. The same research we have now showing that platforms promote more right-leaning than left-leaning content also existed then.

I worked at Twitter at the time (I eventually moved on to Facebook and then Google). Publishing that data or even just pointing to publicly available metrics could have helped shape the media narrative and mitigate the enormous political headache we have today. Instead, we chose not to antagonize a bombastic potential president and ducked the fight.