Last week fellow historian Mar Hicks published a piece in Wired titled “Facebook’s Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford’s.” The news hook for the piece is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress. Hicks likens Haugen’s whistleblowing to a famous document from the 1970s that has become known as the “Pinto memo,” in which staff at Ford Motor Company did a cost-benefit analysis of a proposed federal technical standard. Hicks argues that the memo constituted a kind of turning point in US automobile regulation: “Before there was Big Tech, there were the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors — and an infamous memo that cemented in the collective consciousness that strong regulation was a necessity, not a nicety.”
The upshot for our current moment, Hicks claims, is that Haugen’s whistleblowing is likely a similar turning point: “If the Ford Pinto memo is any indication, Facebook and other major Silicon Valley corporations birthed in the early internet boom are entering the stage when public disaffection with their products provokes robust regulation, backed by a new government enforcement agency.”
What follows lays out three types of errors that affect the Wired piece: First, Hicks gets the Pinto memo’s place in history quite wrong. The most important developments in US auto regulation had taken place well-before the Pinto debacle, which didn’t really influence the regulatory landscape. Second, Hicks mischaracterizes the contents of the Ford memo, which was not about Pintos or lawsuits, though popular mythology holds that it was. Third, as a result of both of these problems, the Wired piece uses the Pinto case to offer readers hopes that are unwarranted from the real history. The late 1970s was not a moment of regulatory blossoming but of looming regulatory decay. In fact, as we’ll see, you could use the Pinto case to argue the exact opposite of what Hicks wants to say: that Facebook and other “Big Tech” firms are unlikely to face any significant new regulations at all.
The reality is that moment in the history of US automobile regulation when it became “cemented in the collective consciousness that strong regulation was a necessity, not a nicety” came in the mid-1960s, more than a decade before the Ford document became public in 1977. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set the first nationally-binding automobile safety standards in US history.