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Adam Mosseri is in a tight spot. He's the head of Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook's social media conglomerate— a conglomerate that is facing louder calls to break up.
There is a renewed bipartisan push in the United States to reign in the power of Big Tech companies like Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon, and ensure they are abiding by antitrust legislation. This is the justification for a recently launched investigation by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission as well as a slew of Congressional hearings and potential action by state attorney generals. Fear about the consequences of increasing monopolization by big tech companies has even led Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to call for the breakup of these companies.
Yet, at the Code Conference on June 10th in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mosseri defended the size of his parent company and criticized the idea of breaking up the company. He argued that without Facebook's resources (Facebook's employees who work on integrity and safety outnumber Instagram's employees in total), it would be difficult for Instagram to address the problems on its platform: "If you’re trying to solve election integrity, if you’re trying to approach content issues like hate speech, and you split us off, it would just make it exponentially more difficult — particularly for us at Instagram — to keep us safe.”
Sundar Pichai is also in a tight spot. He's the CEO of Google, a company that, in addition to adjusting to the EU's new copyright directive and worrying about antitrust investigations in the US, is still dealing with fallout about community guidelines enforcement on YouTube. The proliferation of conspiracy theories, pedophilia, hate speech, and harassment on the media platform has made it a very difficult year so far for the site.
In an interview with CNN, Pichai discussed this very problem. Although he pointed out that YouTube has made massive strides in monitoring its content for community guideline violations, he acknowledged the problem would never really go away. The reason? The platform's size.
“Any large scale systems, it’s tough. Think about credit card systems, there’s some fraud in that. Anything that you run at that scale, you have to think about percentages," he explained.
YouTube's growth as a platform is, in part, due to its acquisition by Google. When YouTube was acquired it was little more than a site for funny videos. With Google's financial resources to back projects like the YouTube Partners Program and movie rentals and increased access to partner with other companies for sports games and presidential debates, YouTube transformed into a popular platform full of engaging content. The acquisition also improved monitoring and video recommendations, as current YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki acknowledged, but it also caused content monitoring to be such an issue in the first place. The platform's continued success sows more seeds for monitoring failures. So why should these companies and platforms remain large and increase in size?
Mosseri and Pichai tell two different stories. According to Mosseri, Big Tech is justifiably big to monitor its content, while Pichai explains that Big Tech is too big, making monitoring all content difficult. From both these accounts, it seems that tech companies in social media have created their own worst monster. As their platforms expanded, so did the number of people who conspired to abuse them. This trend has also provided them with a crutch. Big Tech companies in social media can both evade calls for being broken up and criticisms of how they handle content on their platforms by either saying they're too little or too big. While the breaking up of these companies may worsen the problem of monitoring, it is clear that the growth of social media platforms following their acquisitions by Big Tech companies has engendered the same danger.
