McManus: Congress, make Facebook safer

That from a CEO who often cites his company’s sanctimonious mission statement: “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

If that’s Zuckerberg’s goal, he appears to be failing. On the plus side, he’s made a fortune estimated at roughly $120 billion.

Haugen focused on the ways Facebook and Instagram have targeted children as a “valuable but untapped audience.”

Rarely has blowing a whistle produced such quick results. Facebook announced last month that it was delaying the rollout of Instagram Kids, a new service designed for tweens. But the company still earned a bipartisan flood of criticism from senators ranging from Richard Blumenthal, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, to Marsha Blackburn, a pro-Trump Republican from Tennessee.

Blumenthal, who has long sought tougher regulation of social media, said Haugen’s disclosures “could be a turning point.”

“There seems to be a critical mass (in Congress) now, interested in doing something meaningful,” he told me. “The disclosures of how Facebook is profiting from the harm that it does and how it has sought to conceal that harm is so powerful … and the proof is so visible.”

Blumenthal and other Democrats have a long list of measures they’d like to pass, including changes to the law that absolves internet platforms of responsibility for content they distribute (known as Section 230) and perhaps creating a new federal regulatory agency to oversee the internet. Republicans, not surprisingly, are less enthusiastic about big regulatory changes.

OK, big steps are hard. Try taking some small ones. Here are three — each of which could attract bipartisan support:

• Fund a new digital privacy bureau at the Federal Trade Commission, which has authority to oversee how internet platforms use data from their customers but has only a tiny staff to tackle the problem.
• Update the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to give parents some control over how websites track their children’s activities and provide an “eraser button” to let parents delete content their children post.
• Force Facebook and other platforms to be more transparent about the algorithms they use and to give users more control over the ways content is steered toward them.

One more that should pass, but won’t: the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would require online political advertisements to reveal who paid for them, the same way television and radio ads do. Republicans don’t like the idea.

There’s a good reason the public holds Congress in even lower esteem than the media: They never seem to get much done, even on issues where there’s a broad consensus.

This is one of those issues. It’s an opportunity for lawmakers to improve their standing in the eyes of the voters — and to make the internet safer for their children, their grandchildren and everyone else. Don’t let it slip away.