On free speech, 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 hate-speech machine and to get boycotted by major American companies.
In a speech at Georgetown University last fall, Zuckerberg stated it’s important “we hold each other’s right to express our views and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want.” He noted free speech has been central to the worldwide fight for democracy. He hailed Supreme Court jurisprudence that has strengthened First Amendment protections.
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 and what is not, but the 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 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 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 progressive views on social issues.
Another was Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook wouldn’t censor politicians or fact-check political ads, taking an appropriate view of the company’s ability to fairly police political content involving wildly divergent worldviews.
The final straw was Facebook’s holding out against pressure in May to act against President Donald Trump’s post saying, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This was a stupid, inflammatory and unpresidential thing to say, but it wasn’t an incitement to violence. In keeping the post up, Facebook wanted people to draw their own conclusions; it wasn’t an endorsement but an invitation to debate — exactly what activists want to curtail.
They have pursued two lines of attack. One has been to get companies to stop advertising with Facebook, and many have been only too eager to lend their names to a trendy campaign of intimidation.
The other has been to associate Facebook with the words “racism” and “hate” as much as possible to create the slanderous misimpression that Facebook makes its money off the posts of neo-Nazis.
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 Trump or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez says.
The stakes are especially high. 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.