its Big Tech parent companies -- captures an unfathomable fraction of our
economy, even as it poses risks to our democracy.

The novelty and potential of social media was as present then as it is for AI
now, which should make us wary of its potential harmful consequences for society
and democracy. We legitimately fear artificial voices and manufactured reality
drowning out real people on the internet: on social media, in chat rooms,
everywhere we might try to connect with others.

It doesn't have to be that way. Alongside these evident risks, AI has legitimate
potential to transform both everyday life and democratic governance in positive
ways. In our new book, "Rewiring Democracy," we chronicle examples from around
the globe of democracies using AI to make regulatory enforcement more efficient,
catch tax cheats, speed up judicial processes, synthesize input from
constituents to legislatures, and much more. Because democracies distribute
power across institutions and individuals, making the right choices about how to
shape AI and its uses requires both clarity and alignment across society.

To that end, we spotlight four pivotal choices facing private and public actors.
These choices are similar to those we faced during the advent of social media,
and in retrospect we can see that we made the wrong decisions back then. Our
collective choices in 2025 -- choices made by tech CEOs, politicians, and
citizens alike -- may dictate whether AI is applied to positive and
pro-democratic, or harmful and civically destructive, ends.

A Choice for the Executive and the Judiciary: Playing by the Rules

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) calls it fraud when a candidate hires an
actor to impersonate their opponent. More recently, they had to decide whether
doing the same thing with an AI deepfake makes it okay. (They concluded it does
not.) Although in this case the FEC made the right decision, this is just one
example of how AIs could skirt laws that govern people.

Likewise, courts are having to decide if and when it is okay for an AI to reuse
creative materials without compensation or attribution, which might constitute
plagiarism or copyright infringement if carried out by a human. (The court
outcomes so far are mixed.) Courts are also adjudicating whether corporations
are responsible for upholding promises made by AI customer service
representatives. (In the case of Air Canada, the answer was yes, and insurers
have started covering the liability.)

Social media companies faced many of the same hazards decades ago and have
largely been shielded by the combination of Section 230 of the Communications
Act of 1994 and the safe harbor offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
of 1998. Even in the absence of congressional action to strengthen or add rigor
to this law, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Supreme Court
could take action to enhance its effects and to clarify which humans are
responsible when technology is used, in effect, to bypass existing law.

A Choice for Congress: Privacy

As AI-enabled products increasingly ask Americans to share yet more of their
personal information -- their "context" -- to use digital services like personal
assistants, safeguarding the interests of the American consumer should be a
bipartisan cause in Congress.

It has been nearly 10 years since Europe adopted comprehensive data privacy
regulation. Today, American companies exert massive efforts to limit data
collection, acquire consent for use of data, and hold it confidential under
significant financial penalties -- but only for their customers and users in the
EU.

Regardless, a decade later the U.S. has still failed to make progress on any
serious attempts at comprehensive federal privacy legislation written for the
21st century, and there are precious few data privacy protections that apply to
narrow slices of the economy and population. This inaction comes in spite of
scandal after scandal regarding Big Tech corporations' irresponsible and harmful
use of our personal data: Oracle's data profiling, Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica, Google ignoring data privacy opt-out requests, and many more.

Privacy is just one side of the obligations AI companies should have with
respect to our data; the other side is portability -- that is, the ability for
individuals to choose to migrate and share their data between consumer tools and
technology systems. To the extent that knowing our personal context really does
enable better and more personalized AI services, it's critical that consumers
have the ability to extract and migrate their personal context between AI
solutions. Consumers should own their own data, and with that ownership should
come explicit control over who and what platforms it is shared with, as well as
withheld from. Regulators could mandate this interoperability. Otherwise, users
are locked in and lack freedom of choice between competing AI solutions -- much
like the time invested to build a following on a social network has locked many
users to those platforms.

A Choice for States: Taxing AI Companies

It has become increasingly clear that social media is not a town square in the
utopian sense of an open and protected public forum where political ideas are
distributed and debated in good faith. If anything, social media has coarsened
and degraded our public discourse. Meanwhile, the sole act of Congress designed
to substantially reign in the social and political effects of social media
platforms -- the TikTok ban, which aimed to protect the American public from
Chinese influence and data collection, citing it as a national security threat
-- is one it seems to no longer even acknowledge.

While Congress has waffled, regulation in the U.S. is happening at the state
level. Several states have limited children's and teens' access to social media.
With Congress having rejected -- for now -- a threatened federal moratorium on
state-level regulation of AI, California passed a new slate of AI regulations
after mollifying a lobbying onslaught from industry opponents. Perhaps most
interesting, Maryland has recently become the first in the nation to levy taxes
on digital advertising platform companies.

States now face a choice of whether to apply a similar reparative tax to AI
companies to recapture a fraction of the costs they externalize on the public to
fund affected public services. State legislators concerned with the potential
loss of jobs, cheating in schools, and harm to those with mental health concerns
caused by AI have options to combat it. They could extract the funding needed to
mitigate these harms to support public services -- strengthening job training
programs and public employment, public schools, public health services, even
public media and technology.

A Choice for All of Us: What Products Do We Use, and How?

A pivotal moment in the social media timeline occurred in 2006, when Facebook
opened its service to the public after years of catering to students of select
universities. Millions quickly signed up for a free service where the only
source of monetization was the extraction of their attention and personal d---
FMail-lnx 2.3.1.0
 * Origin: TCOB1 A Mail Only System (618:500/1)