Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, October 12th. I'm Nyla Boudou. Here's

what you need to know today. The challenge is a permanent housing for Afghan refugees,

plus the abysmal rate of female biographies on Wikipedia. But first, Big Tech's Big

Tobacco Moment is today's one big thing. Senators at the Facebook hearing last week

used an analogy we've heard before. The Big Tech is having its Big Tobacco Moment. Well,

it took decades to put real regulations on Big Tobacco, and Axios' technology correspondent

Inafreed is here to tell us what could be next for Big Tech companies. Hey, Nyla. Let's

first start with, is this a fair comparison? Why are people making this? I think it's a somewhat

fair comparison. I think it's not totally apt. It's fair in the sense that, you know, you're

talking about a product that's widely used that also has some harms that are reasonably

well understood, but that the companies have researched and known, but tried to hide.

I think one of the things that's super important to keep in mind is when you talk about tobacco,

and when you were talking about companies that were largely producing the same thing, and

then they didn't change a whole lot over time either. So it was a pretty static target

to go after, and even still it took decades to go from understanding that cigarettes were

harmful to meaningful change through regulation and litigation and legislation.

What other challenges do you think there are in terms of quantifying the effect of social

media in terms of just gathering data about this?

Well, again, you know, it was hard even in the tobacco days to say, yes, you know, this

person got lung cancer. They probably got it from smoking, but how do you prove it? It's

much tougher when we're talking about technology, because how do you say that someone was radicalized

by social media? Or, you know, how do you quantify the harms of anti-vaccine or COVID misinformation?

...