Social Media Regulation

Social media regulation covers the statutes, agencies, and liability rules that govern how platforms carry, rank, and remove user content, and how they handle the data and attention of the people using them. Conservatives approach it with a divided mind: alarm at what unregulated platforms have done to children, families, and public argument, set against a settled distrust of the administrative machinery that regulation creates.

The conservative preference resolves that tension in a particular direction. Clear liability rules enforced by courts are favoured over discretionary supervision by a new agency, because the first binds the regulator as much as the regulated and the second does not.

Key Takeaways

• The American framework rests on the Communications Act of 1934 and on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
• Broadcast regulation supplies the historical template: the Radio Act of 1927, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Fairness Doctrine adopted in 1949 and abandoned in 1987.
• Conservatives split between those who want the largest platforms treated as common carriers and those who regard any such mandate as an assault on private property.
• Child safety has produced the least contested regulatory advance, including age verification statutes and Australia’s minimum-age law for social media accounts.
• Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge is the standard conservative objection to a dedicated platform regulator: the rules would be obsolete before they were drafted.

History And Context

Regulating a communications network is not a new problem, and the precedents shape every current proposal. English common law imposed duties on common carriers, innkeepers, and ferrymen who held themselves out to serve the public: they could not refuse custom arbitrarily. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 carried that principle into American statute for railways.

Radio forced the next step. Broadcasters interfered with one another on a physical spectrum, and the Radio Act of 1927 created a federal commission to allocate licences in the public interest. The Communications Act of 1934 replaced it with the Federal Communications Commission and extended jurisdiction to telephony.¹ Under that authority the FCC adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, obliging licensees to cover controversial issues and to present contrasting views. The Commission abandoned it in 1987 on the reasoning that scarcity no longer justified the intrusion and that the rule chilled coverage rather than balancing it. Conservatives cite that reversal constantly: a rule sold as a guarantee of balance became a lever over broadcasters, and it took thirty-eight years to remove.

The internet was handled differently. Section 230, enacted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, provided that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of content supplied by another, and separately protected good-faith removal of objectionable material.² The provision was written for message boards. It now governs recommendation systems that select what several billion people see each day, and both parties have proposed amending it for opposite reasons.

Europe moved toward supervision. The General Data Protection Regulation took effect in 2018, the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act followed, and large platforms now carry statutory duties to assess systemic risk and to open aspects of their systems to audit. Australia legislated a minimum age of sixteen for social media accounts in November 2024, with enforcement beginning the following year, and several American states have enacted age verification requirements that remain in litigation.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue from four premises.

The first concerns the form of the rule. A liability rule states in advance what conduct creates exposure and leaves enforcement to courts, where both sides appear and the reasoning is published. A supervisory agency issues guidance, negotiates, and applies discretion that no one votes on. Conservatives prefer the first because it is legible and because it constrains the state’s own agents. The Fairness Doctrine is the standing example of what the second becomes.

The second is the knowledge problem. Hayek’s argument, set out in 1945, was that the information needed to direct a complex order exists only in dispersed, local, partly tacit form, and cannot be assembled at a centre.³ Applied here: any regulator drafting rules for ranking algorithms is describing a system that will have changed by the time the rule clears consultation. The predictable result is not good regulation but compliance theatre, which the largest firms can afford and their competitors cannot. Regulatory capture is the ordinary outcome, and it entrenches the incumbents whose power prompted the regulation.

The third is subsidiarity. Decisions about what children see belong to parents and, failing that, to states and provinces, not to a national or supranational authority. Conservatives support age verification and default protections for minors partly because these restore parental authority rather than transferring it to an agency. Jonathan Haidt’s argument that the shift to phone-based childhood after 2010 tracks a measurable deterioration in adolescent mental health has been taken up across the political spectrum, and conservatives cite it while resisting the inference that a federal regulator should own the remedy.⁴

The fourth is the speech asymmetry. Conservatives who accept regulation of data practices, minors’ access, and market dominance stop short at rules governing the content of political argument, on the ground that a state authorised to police falsehood will decide what counts as false.

Differing Positions

Progressives make a market-failure argument. Network effects produce durable monopolies that competition cannot discipline; the harms are externalities that no user bargains over; and the industry has had three decades to self-correct without doing so. On this reading, courts adjudicating individual suits are too slow and too fragmented for a system that operates continuously and at scale, and a standing regulator with technical staff is the only instrument that matches the problem.

Libertarians reject the conservative position from the other side. Age verification requires identity infrastructure that becomes a surveillance system; common-carrier mandates convert private firms into state instruments; and every regulatory apparatus built by a friendly government will be inherited by an unfriendly one. The rule you write for your opponents will be enforced against you.

A third position holds that the target is misidentified. The relevant harm on this view lies in the advertising business model that rewards engagement over accuracy, and reforms that leave the model intact will change little regardless of who administers them.

References

1. Communications Act of 1934, 47 U.S.C. § 151 et seq.
2. Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. § 230.
3. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945).
4. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, 2024).