In early 2014, I found myself explaining that the president would not be pulling underwear from the crack of his ass.

I doubt speechwriters for Roosevelt or Reagan encountered that sort of challenge. But the Obama White House believed in, to borrow our own stock phrase, “meeting people where they live.” President Obama filmed Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifiankis. He joined Jerry Seinfeld for an episode of Comedians in Cars. And while we never did ask him to adjust a wedgie for BuzzFeed, he gamely grabbed a selfie-stick and made faces in the mirror as he promoted HealthCare.gov.

When it came to new tools for reaching the American people, however, nothing compared to social media. I still remember my astonishment when the president teased his plan for free community college in a two-minute Facebook post. As if by magic, it received millions of views overnight. (I don’t know how many people watched the formal speech laying out the policy. But it sure wasn’t millions.)

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That was my glimpse of social-networking utopia: a chance to engage directly with voters. We could persuade the public with authentic, to-the-point messages rather than boring them with policy details. And thanks to an algorithm I couldn’t even begin to understand, our ideas would naturally reach the audience most receptive to them. Technology could change democracy forever. And the most powerful democracy-changing technology, by far, was Facebook.

I’m still proud to have been part of an administration that walked the walk when it came to innovation. I still believe in meeting people where they live. But it turns out that digital promised land is more of a minefield. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit aren’t the only things threatening to tear apart our country, but they’re too often tugging at the seams. We can have our current version of social media, or we can have our current version of democracy. We can’t have both.

The most recent evidence of this, of course, is the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica. The firm’s exact role and effectiveness remain unclear. What is clear is that 50 million Facebook users had their data harvested by a political organization under false pretenses—and that the world’s most powerful social-media giant did almost nothing to protect them.

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Not surprisingly, Facebook sees it differently. They point out that once they learned Cambridge Analytica was misusing data, they demanded “certifications” that the shady practices would cease. Their strategy, in other words, was to ask people acting in bad faith to start acting in good faith.

How’s that working out? In Myanmar, the UN says misinformation spread on Facebook is fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. According to recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals, Facebook was Putin’s preferred platform for meddling in our 2016 election, and other democracies are similarly under attack. What was supposed to be a leveling of the playing field—a populism of ideas and information—has instead become another arrow in the authoritarian’s quiver.

It’s precisely because Facebook is so crucial to so many of our lives that it’s the best place to start combatting the threat social media poses to democracy. Facebook deserves some credit for stepping up its self-policing when it comes to fake news and elections. Mark Zuckerberg has apologized and promised to do better, which is certainly necessary if not sufficient. But protecting our system of self-government shouldn’t depend on a company’s pro bono work or a billionaire’s good intentions.



Congress needs to deal with the current crisis. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Republican John Kennedy recently called for Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the judiciary committee. On the intelligence committees, Senator Mark Warner and Rep. Adam Schiff have warned Facebook its current efforts to fight election meddling are insufficient. Good. It’s time to treat social-media companies like banks, energy companies, or any other corporation that controls a vital resource. They should be subjected to real oversight—and held accountable not just for malfeasance, but for neglect.

And all of us need to be ready to prevent the next crisis before it starts. To be effective citizens, we don't need to be tech experts. But we do need to be tech literate. We need to understand how the information we consume is produced and distributed; how our data is collected and used; and how we can figure out which sources to trust.

There’s no reason We, the People, should have to choose between the benefits of technology and the benefits of self-government. And if we start viewing services like Facebook as essential rather than tangential—if we make the internet harder for charlatans, authoritarians, and extremists to hijack and easier for citizens to understand—we won’t have to.

Oh, and please share this article on Facebook. How else will anyone read it?

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