Tech platforms, mixed messages.
“Platform” is one of those tech buzzwords that has gone from little-known outside of the skunkworks of Silicon Valley to frequently dropped on the radio and in the opinion pages of newspapers. Often used to describe networks created by tech companies like Facebook and Twitter to host content created by users, platforms have always been considered “neutral.”
In the thinking of Silicon Valley, a platform is like a stage or soapbox — an elevated setting for anyone to share his or her views with the world. If those views are inflammatory or flat- out wrong, the platform builder pleads not guilty. I merely built a stage, the argument went. You can’t hold me responsible for what appears on it or how its audience reacts.
After the racist mob attacks in Charlottesville, Va., and the killing of Heather Heyer (as well as the president’s tepid response), some Silicon Valley platform chieftains decided neutrality was not enough. Facebook removed racist channels; YouTube and GoDaddy refused to host neo-Nazi content; even OKCupid banned a high-profile white supremacist for life.
What took them so long? Claiming that a platform is neutral was always a dodge, a way to profit from a space without owning whatever occupies it. Claiming to be a mere platform for something (shortterm rentals, micro-blogging) was a tidy way to exonerate yourself from actually being that thing (landlord, publishing company). But if something thrives because of the platform you created, it’s hard to argue that you’re not, on some level, that thing.
Let’s say you’re Facebook and people use your Live video feed to stream acts of violence, as happened several times since it was launched last year. That’s bad, Facebook can say, but, come on, it’s not our fault: We just built a platform.
Mark Zuckerberg practically did say that, telling Buzzfeed’s Mat Honan, “We built this big technology platform so we can go and support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate are as time goes on.”
In other words, whatever people do on the platform is their own business … even though Facebook’s business depends upon it.
Besides, Facebook doesn’t tell users how to use Facebook: The company just built a massive, high-profile, addictive, all-powerful platform for them to present … whatever.
Sure, Facebook’s News Feed normalizes these videos of horrific acts by placing them alongside shared articles, memes and personal updates, but that’s how a platform works. It just sits there while other people place things on it.
And, yes, Facebook’s massive global audience can make bad actors instantly famous worldwide, but that’s because it’s a really big platform! Why should they be punished for their success?
When tech companies make the platform defense, I’m reminded of the time Stephen Bannon, the recently departed White House chief strategist, boasted to Mother Jones reporter Sarah Posner that Breitbart.com. the website he helped build into a juggernaut, is “the platform for the alt-right.”
Rather than call Breitbart a destination for news and opinions with a hard right, racist slant, Bannon used Silicon Valley buzzspeak to frame it passively as a platform. Sure, many of its dubiously sourced, obviously biased stories amplified the racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant sentiments seen in Charlottesville (and before that, in the Trump presidential campaign), but Breitbart isn’t to blame for that.
But, here’s the thing: Breitbart — as well as Facebook, and all the other self-designated platforms of our age — are not planks of wood nailed together to present someone else’s show. They’re companies whose success is determined by popularity.
If popularity means a few Facebook Live horror shows that generate clicks along with some Old Media clucking, so be it. If that means tainting “news” with inflammatory rhetoric, so what? It’s not like anyone’s getting killed, right?
As Charlottesville showed us, sometimes people do get killed. It’s about time these platform makers woke up and dropped the curtains on their most antisocial shows.