Jane Bambauer

This project begins with an account of social media as a vice. That is, it has the two qualities that make certain goods and services vices: that they are bad for the health or wellbeing of the individuals who use them, and that despite this fact, consumers continue to want to use them (at least in the short term). There is at least some credible evidence that social media has addictive and damaging qualities. While its use is not dangerous for every person, or for any person at every time, nevertheless just as alcohol can simultaneously be a source of joy and misery depending on the context, social media may very well have a complicated and often negative impact on its users. Next, I show that many of the other complaints about social media platforms—that they invade privacy, that they manipulate their users, or that they engage in anticompetitive practices—are either not convincing as descriptive matters or are reformulations of the vice problem. If we acknowledge that policymakers are addressing a new form of vice—something in which the consumers who are the targets of protection are also co-creators of the problem—public policy debates can be injected with some realism. After all, we have very limited policy tools in the chest that have a record of success dealing with vice. Some experiments (like prohibition and the war on drugs) caused more problems than they solved. I will attempt to lay out the strategies to reduce vice that have worked in the past, in the U.S. as well as abroad, and analyze whether we could expect similar outcomes when applied to social media. In the end, I expect to argue that taxation and government information campaigns will be the most promising, but don’t count on any miracles.

Jane Bambauer is a professor of law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer teaches and studies the fundamental problems of well-intended technology policies. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and how new information technologies affect free speech, privacy, and competitive markets. She also serves as the co-deputy director of the Center for Quantum Networks, a multi-institutional engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation, where she facilitates research on economic and regulatory policy for emerging markets in quantum technologies. Bambauer’s work has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Her work has also been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fox News, and Lawfare. She holds a BS in Mathematics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.