Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is right
Mark Zuckerberg clearly hasn’t gotten the memo.
The founder of Facebook persists in defending free expression, even though free speech has fallen decidedly out of fashion.
His reward for adhering to what once would have been a commonsensical, if not banal, view of the value of the free exchange of ideas is to get vilified for running a hatespeech machine and to get boycotted by major American companies.
At a widely noted speech at Georgetown University last fall, Zuckerberg stated that it’s important “we hold each others’ right to express our views and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want.” He noted that free speech has been central to the worldwide fight for democracy. He hailed Supreme Court jurisprudence that has strengthened First Amendment protections. In sum, he said, “I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”
Once upon a time, the reaction would have been, “We’re glad that a titan of Silicon Valley has absorbed core American values and is attempting, however imperfectly, to apply them to his company.”
In 2020, the reaction instead has been, “Let’s get the bastard.”
Internet companies are always going to be engaged in the fraught business of drawing the line between what’s permissible or not, and subject to pressures from all sides about where exactly to draw it. But the current Facebook controversy is more consequential than that. The company is the target of left-wing activists who, with the ready assent of corporate America, have been able to force a wave of cancellations around the culture and now seek to bend a social-media behemoth to their will. Full disclosure: My publication,
National Review, is part of the Facebook News tab.
The Georgetown speech was one of the precipitating events of the boycott, as it led the activists to conclude, as a report in POLITICO magazine put it, “the CEO believed, deep in his bones, that his commitment to free expression ... was right.”
And again, this was a bad thing. One flashpoint was Zuckerberg’s reference to the importance of the First Amendment to the cause of civil rights over the years. This was a true and unassailable point, but one that activists considered offensive coming from Zuckerberg—as if he’s Bull Connor rather than a Silicon Valley executive with reliably progressive views on social issues.
Another was Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook wouldn’t censor politicians or fact-check political ads, taking an appropriately modest view of the company’s ability to fairly police political content involving wildly divergent worldviews and values.
Who is Facebook to decide, say, whether Donald Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting express a legitimate concern about ballot security, or are malign efforts at voter suppression? This is a deeply political question that people of goodwill can and do disagree about.
The left has been sore at Facebook since 2016 and bought into the cracked idea that Russian actors spending tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads somehow swayed a presidential election, when the presidential campaigns themselves spent tens of millions on Facebook ads. If the Russians were truly able to leverage such meager resources into controlling an event on the scale of an American presidential election, Vladimir Putin should stop trying to invade his neighbors and instead conquer the world through his sheer prowess on social media.
The final straw that finally brought on the boycott was Facebook’s holding out against pressure in late May to act against Trump’s infamous post saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This was a stupid, inflammatory and unpresidential thing to say, although Trump later said he meant it to discourage the looting, not to encourage the shooting. In keeping the post up, Facebook wanted people to draw their own conclusions; it wasn’t an endorsement, but an invitation to debate and democratic deliberation—exactly what the activists want to curtail.
They have pursued two lines of attack. One has been to get companies to stop advertising with Facebook. These are private entities that are free to do what they want with their marketing dollars, but the alacrity with which they’ve lent their names to a trendy campaign of intimidation is disturbing.
The other has been to associate Facebook with the words “racism” and “hate” as much as possible. The boycott is called the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, and meant to create the slanderous misimpression that Facebook makes its money off the posts of neo-Nazis rather than the ordinary people who find it, for better or worse, a useful platform.
I’ve been harshly critical of Facebook over the years, but on this it is right. The public is served by a robust debate online, where people can decide for themselves the merits of what Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says.
The stakes are especially high in this particular fight. Facebook is an institution too big to cancel. Despite all the corporate names associated with it, the advertising boycott is a mere flesh wound in terms of the company’s revenue. If Zuckerberg can nonetheless be browbeaten out of his well-considered support for a free speech-centric approach to his platform, it will be a particularly portentous omen, in a period of our national life full of them.