Former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer is no stranger to regulation.
Ballmer led the Washington state software giant from 2000 to 2014, steering the company through years of antitrust battles.
And now he still has a foot in the political world through his nonpartisan nonprofit group, USAFacts. The organization aims to make government data available so Americans can form their own positions on policy issues by accessing everything from the amount of COVID cases by county to the number of visas granted last year.
The group’s mission has taken on a new level of significance since the 2016 election, with fake news and “alternate facts” frequently in the headlines. The organization recently launched a $10 million campaign, which has been running ads during the presidential debates to encourage voters to “find the nonpartisan facts behind the real stories.”
We recently spoke about that work and some of the top regulatory issues facing the tech industry.
Q: Have the stakes changed for USAFacts, given the unique challenges with this election cycle?
A: The numbers we present are all government numbers. I trust in our statistical agencies.
With the pandemic and our economy changing in real time, as things fly around, we need to anchor back in the data. And I’d say that to all politicians running for any office here in 2020.
Is it more important? Yeah, I think it probably is more important. But the thing I want to emphasize is this kind of data, this kind of information is always important. Its importance is highlighted by the current sort of wild state of affairs.
Q: Now that we’re several months into the pandemic, how has USAFacts had to evolve to address this crisis?
A: We were agile and said, ‘Look let’s get all of the data we can get that’s relevant to this in keeping people educated.’ The first obvious thing to go look at is covid cases and covid deaths. You think that would be straightforward, and while there is government data, it is collected county by county. What we found early on was nobody was assembling the countywide data into an integrated picture. So we wrote some programs to scoop up county data. We actually have a few people make phone calls also every day to get county data from some counties that you can’t scoop things up electronically. And we assemble that into a daily update by county of covid cases and deaths. In fact, we were first, quickest and most reliable to do that. So the (Centers for Disease Control) has been using our data collection pipeline and has, in fact, been referring people off the CDC website to us.
And then we said this pandemic is about two things: it’s about health and it’s about the economy. So we put together a covid-19 impact and recovery hub … And you can click on this report on our home page and immediately (see) cases and deaths by geography, unemployment claims by state and national, air travel passengers, retail sales, household spending, personal income, food scarcity, housing scarcity. What is going on? These are all numbers that are changing in real time.
Q: Do you think the facts are able to get the same engagement from users as some of the more viral misinformation or even exaggerated claims we see often circulating on social media?
A: No. People who want to get followings want to be completely provocative. They want to make emotional, exaggerated statements. Things that are truthful, and that often times they don’t feed an extreme narrative on either side, are almost harder to get people to get excited about.
If you’re a partisan, and you are not open-minded, you will rally to what I’ll call the extreme extreme cry and not the truthful and maybe less emotional reality.
Q: Do you think the social media companies themselves need to make changes so that truth and unemotional reality can break through?
A: I don’t think social media companies can control human emotion. If people don’t want to hear about the nuance, they’re not going to hear about it.
But policing that is different than policing hate speech or some of these other more extreme forms of outlandish behavior.
Q: But do you think they need to make changes to address misinformation and disinformation?
A: They’re going to have to get their technology to work harder, and they’re going to have to engage with the regulators to really decide what is it that society really wants them to do. To what degree do they want these guys to block expression? To what degree do they want to have them post related data? To what degree do they want to ban certain stuff? To what degree does that only need to be on people that have a lot of followers? To what degree do they need to have really smart technology that might find some things, but it might also make some mistakes as it screens through what to comment on?
These are very tough challenges, and trying to to write them down will be hard. It’ll be hard for the companies and the regulators. And I think they need to engage. I also think this is probably stuff that’s better done with regulatory bodies than is done with the legislature because laws are sort of a blunt object.
A lot of this stuff will need to be figured out with people who are chartered by our citizens and really get the nuances of these issues that these companies would face.
Q: Is it time to change Section 230?
A: Possibly, but if you modify it the wrong way, you could shut down all expression, too. If you were to rewrite 230 (which shields tech companies from lawsuits for the posts people share on their services) in the wrong way, all of a sudden social media companies would probably have to sort of shut down a lot of expression, perfectly fine and reasonable expression.
You can’t go to its blanket, not OK, because then you run into freedom of speech issues. And yet we know the way things are today is also not OK.
Q: Obviously you had a lot of experience with antitrust at Microsoft, and the Department of Justice just brought an antitrust case against Google. Do you have any advice for Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai?
A: Whatever you’re going to do, wherever you’re willing to do, whatever you think is going to be done with you and to you, it’s better to be done sooner than later.
Part of the issue in this antitrust world to me is you could do something to the company that seems perfectly fair, rational, reasonable and appropriate under the law. And if you’ve done a lot, if you do it all very well and you wind up in a position that later gets deemed a monopoly, people might tell you that that action that you engaged in that was reasonable and right is no longer OK because you have been deemed to be a monopoly. (Google will) have to decide how much they want to get stuck on the reasonableness of their action, how much they’re willing to really negotiate. Certainly my view is better to resolve these things quicker than slower, even if what you agreed to you don’t necessarily think it’s fair.
If it’s going to wind up being the resolution anyway, you’re better off getting there quickly. I would say that that would be my learning from our activities. There was an earlier (Federal Trade Commission) investigation into us starting in the early ’90s, then the antitrust case in the late ’90s. I don’t think we wrapped things up with the European Commission until the late 2000s. There had to be a better way.