Facebook fury Putin’s pugnacious puppet

Whether it’s herd instinct or genuine feeling, scores of major businesses are lining up against Facebook over its lax controls over hate speech and divisive politics. The media giant is pushing back with promises to crack down on the abuses it tolerated for too long.

When the likes of Unilever, CocaCola and Starbucks cancel ads, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally is taking notice. He’s pledging to rein in conduct that suppresses voting or inflames racial feelings. That hardly covers all of the bad behavior on the platform, but it signals a change from its shrugshoulder tendency.

The financial side of the picture bears examining. The giant companies killing their ads are bowing to the public mood and also saving billions in online ads. Facebook’s steadily rising revenue and army of users won’t likely be pinched. But the firm can’t ignore a brewing boycott that includes major civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the AntiDefamation League.

Facebook is feeling the heat in other ways. No one much likes it in Washington, where conservatives believe it muzzles their views and liberals think its too timid to stem lies and abusive conduct. Facebook has hired thousands to screen out the worst of it, but that hasn’t mollified critics.

The platform continues to live in a fantasyland where it views lies, fear mongering and racial taunts as the ebb and flow of public life. Judging this conduct would undercut its role as social connector and turn it into a censor, Zuckerberg has long argued.

But that lax, handsoff stance won’t work any more, and it’s especially hypocritical for a company that allowed Russian front groups to interfere in the 2016 presidential election along with the Cambridge Analytica data breach that tapped the information of millions of users. A company that’s so easily manipulated can’t get away with defending itself as the home of free expression.

The best hope for Facebook is that its struggling leadership will clamp down more widely and forcefully on the problems it’s hosting. Racism, voter misinformation and violent content demand a thumbs down, not the temporizing to date.

A better title for “Just as Russia would want” (Editorial, June 30), about President Trump again doubting U.S. intelligence and refusing to sanction or even question the Russian government, this time for reportedly having paid the Taliban to kill American and allied troops in Afghanistan, is this: “Putin’s pugnacious puppet in the White House.”

Henrik Lundquist, Tiburon