Opinion | Should Facebook and Google be broken up to save democracy, as US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren suggested?

In October, a confrontation erupted between one of the leading Democratic candidates for the US presidency, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Warren had called for a break-up of Facebook, and Zuckerberg said in an internal speech that this represented an “existential” threat to his company.

Facebook was then criticised for running an ad by US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that carried a false claim charging former vice-president Joe Biden, another leading Democrat contender, with corruption. Warren trolled the company by placing her own deliberately false ad. 

But social media has enormous power to amplify certain voices and to be weaponised by forces hostile to democracy, from Russian trolls to American conspiracy theorists. This has led to calls for the government to regulate internet platforms to preserve democratic discourse itself.

But what forms of regulation are constitutional and feasible? The US Constitution’s First Amendment contains very strong free-speech protections. While many conservatives have accused Facebook and Google of “censoring” voices on the right, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech; law and precedent protect the ability of internet platforms to moderate their own content.