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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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October 14, 2021

Who Will Fix Social Media?

After the latest round of Facebook controversy, driven by whistleblower revelations and congressional testimony, many agree that social media's problems run deep. The question is: Who will do something about it?
 
Efforts by both Facebook and the US government have been lackluster, New York Times tech journalist Kara Swisher has argued. A Senate hearing last week to confirm a Department of Justice anti-trust nominee revealed broad, bipartisan appetite for doing … something, but Swisher isn't holding her breath for meaningful action. Neither is The Economist, which writes in a new cover story that Silicon Valley's private-sector "digital gatekeepers are doing a mixed job. But it is increasingly clear that it is not their job at all. The trade-offs around what can be said, done and bought online urgently need the input of elected representatives. So far governments have been better at complaining than at taking responsibility."
 
Of course, the debate isn't just over who will act, but also over what should be done. Various critics have advocated more moderation of user posts, but at the World Politics Review, Howard French sees in that approach similarities to how China prunes political speech in its walled-off online spaces. At American Purpose, Steven Hill resurfaces the idea of treating social-media platforms like utilities, requiring them to obtain licenses and restricting things like how much personal data they can "suck up."
 
That publication's chair, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, has advocated the notion of "middleware"—third-party platforms layered between Facebook, for instance, and users, which could let people choose their own news-feed algorithms from a menu of alternative purveyors. Though not quite the same thing, as Andrew Deck writes for Rest of World, independent news-recommendation apps do exist, and the market for them is being tested.

Bad Times for Europe's Populist Right

Right-wing European populism has just suffered three separate blows, Frida Ghitis writes for the World Politics Review: Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis was dealt a setback in parliamentary elections and may lose power, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz resigned amid a corruption scandal, and Poles have protested a court's ruling that EU laws and regulations are null in the country if they contradict Poland's constitution—a decision that, in turn, contradicts how the EU works.
 
"Whether or not the populist right is about to lose power in the Czech Republic, Austria or Poland is still unclear," Ghitis writes. "But the events of the past few days have put their forces on the defensive in three major Central European countries. It's still early to predict a definitive pendulum swing, but this could, in fact, be a turning point."

Did Iran Lose Iraq's Elections?

Iraq's recent elections saw Iran's political allies lose ground to the Shia faction led by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. What does that mean for the country? Iranian influence could be on the wane, as Tehran "has every reason to be dissatisfied" with the results, Mina Al-Oraibi suggests at Foreign Policy, writing that "the biggest losers appear to be pro-Iranian militant groups," whose power Sadr has promised to curtail.

Time for the US to Stop Relying on Drones?

After the US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden stressed that the US still has the means to fight "over the horizon." Indeed it does, but on Aug. 29, when the US military used a drone to target what it thought was an ISIS-K bomb threat, 10 civilians were killed in what a top US commander later called a "tragic" mistake.
 
At Foreign Affairs, Audrey Kurth Cronin writes that America's burgeoning drone double-down is all wrong, given the danger to civilians and what that means for US goals.
 
"[B]y increasing its reliance on drone strikes" post withdrawal, Cronin writes, "Washington will be embracing a tactic that played a major role in the United States' strategic defeat in Afghanistan. Throughout the two decades of war there, U.S. policymakers used short-term operations such as drone strikes to put off thinking about and confronting" bigger problems. "Drones also killed hundreds of innocent civilians ... Errant strikes, especially those that hit children, can inflame local populations and help extremists recruit new members. ... There is no reason to think drones will be more strategically successful in Afghanistan going forward than they have been for the past 20 years."