Social media transparency advocates are pushing for a new bill that they hope will make the platforms less harmful to users.
Social media and hate speech: who decides?
The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) isn’t the first legislation to inject transparency into the secret sauce that powers popular social media platforms. While previous attempts, like the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act of 2020, failed to pass, PATA comes amid growing fears about social media, following the Facebook Papers leaks and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri’s Senate testimony.
“If the Facebook Papers have taught us anything, it’s that there is real harm being done to sensitive groups of users, like teens. We absolutely need research into that harm, but it’s important that it’s done by researchers outside the platforms themselves, so that even if the findings of those research projects are unflattering, they still see the light of day,” Laura Edelson, a Ph.D. candidate at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and principal investigator in NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project, explained in an email to Lifewire.
PATA was announced by Democratic Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) and Republican Senator Rob Portman (Ohio).
