If Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are hunkered down this week strategizing how to handle a devastating cascade of bad press, you can understand why. Wednesday's in-depth New York Times story documents how Facebook has consistently taken a “delay, deny and deflect” approach to addressing its critics—rather than, you know, fixing Facebook's real problems. A raft of other negative stories have followed, most picking up on selected details from the Times story, of which the most absurd include the attempt to blame criticism of Facebook on George Soros and Zuckerberg's reported insistence, after Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized social media companies, that top execs abandon their iPhones.
But instead of trying to spin the company's way out of this week's new PR problem, Zuck and Sandberg should pivot right now and focus on creating a new public policy and legal framework for the company that would comprehensively restore public trust. What does that new framework look like? A series of journal articles by Yale law professor Jack Balkin, culminating in a forthcoming article for the Buffalo Law Review called “The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age,” suggests some important steps we can take to reframe our relationships with both companies and government when it comes to today's internet. The basic idea is to create a new legal category—he calls it “information fiduciaries”—that is a better fit for the roles Facebook and other companies play as facilitators of our free-speech rights and trustees of our personal data.
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