Regulators Can Look Into Social Media’s Black Box: Parmy Olson

There’s a perfectly good reason to break open the secrets of social-media giants. Over the past decade, governments have watched helplessly as their democratic processes were disrupted by misinformation and hate speech on sites like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Twitter Inc. Now some governments are gearing up for a comeuppance.

In the next two years, Europe and the UK are preparing laws that will rein in the troublesome content that social-media firms have allowed to go viral. There has been much skepticism over their ability to look under the hood of companies like Facebook. Regulators, after all, lack the technical ...