‘Statebook’ won’t save us from Facebook

Hurrah! Statebook will save us from Facebook. New York Times premier columnist David Leonhardt, reflecting prevailing wisdom, says “Facebook, along with other huge technology companies, needs stronger government oversight.” I’m tempted to ask “How?” But first I need to ask “Why?”

I’m no fan of Facebook. If it did not exist I cannot imagine people going about saying “Do you know what I really need?” then describing this website where a random stream of barely intelligible rubbish pours down your “wall” from a huge group of “friends” you don’t know from Vladimir Putin. Though of course I have a Facebook page.

I try to use it, and Twitter, to engage intelligently and civilly with people who care what I think. Which may prompt a belly laugh followed by hasty unfriending or unfollowing. But that’s how to “regulate” these platforms: Do not consume or generate rubbish.

My own rule for Facebook “friends” is to try to decline or purge any whose posts feature swearing, hatred or references to democratically elected politicians as “traitors.” (Scantily clad foreign womenkeentomeetmeget flagged as spam. I may be absurdly vain, but I’m not completely stupid.)

This method of regulation is not perfect. As Kant said, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. And I have been amazed since the days of the email “flame” (the digital late Bronze Age, I realize) at how an online environment seems not only to unmask but to enlarge our flaws. Even the infamous Russian exploitation of social media to poison political discourse relied on our eagerness to chug from such chalices.

In a classic Reddit exchange five years ago, the question “If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about today?” was answered “I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in to arguments with strangers.”

It’s not just the sneering tribal abuse. It’s the copyright violations. The frivolous vanity. The cybercrime. The bots. What I would call the invasion of privacy had we not done the digital equivalent of stripping naked and dancing down the street. (No, please, you cry.) In a phrase Andrew Lewis may have coined, if the product is free, you are the product.

Why did we willingly tell strangers so much about ourselves? But the fault lies not in our servers but in ourselves. Pre-internet TV advertising was infamous for appealing to every human failing except perhaps pride as it openly insulted your intelligence. Tabloid newspapers churned out rubbish with appalling cheek.

Thus to call for government regulation is, first and foremost, to fall into the bizarre fallacy that all the failings we exhibit in our private conduct vanish once we enter into government. How this conclusion can be drawn from real-life observation of politicians or bureaucrats I do not know.

The marketplace requirement to make an offer that appeals to the other person too is among the most effective checks on human misconduct ever devised. Whereas the defining feature of government is not its superior virtue but its claiming and enforcing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a society, which removes that constraint on our vices petty and vast.

Censorship never produces more intelligent or virtuous debate than the raucous ruckus we call free speech. Would you rather choose between the National Enquirer and the National Post, or between Pravda and Izvestia?

The saving grace of proposals such as Leonhardt’s is that they are ludicrous. As he gingerly allows “How to regulate the tech giants is looking more and more like one of our era’s great unsolved policy questions.” Um yeah.

Policing half a billion Tweets daily and 300 hours of YouTube video a minute would foil even the East German secret police. And to the extent that it could be done in a free society, the seamier discussion would just slither off into other platforms.

Leonhardt quoted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that “it’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policy should be, for people all around the world.” No. Of course not. But people sitting in an office in Washington isn’t an improvement, though naturally there are laws against criminal conduct online as elsewhere.

So who is going to police all this? Us. The users. Or not. But nobody else can or should. And none of us has to examine everything on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, smaller platforms or the “dark web.” We just have to watch ourselves.

A daunting task? Sure. But would you rather have the government watching you?