Will Zuckerberg dump Trump, or continue to serve him?
Facebook doesn’t take civil rights seriously. If I hadn’t heard it first-hand – with Mark Zuckerberg trying to sell me on one failed, inadequate excuse after another during our meeting last Tuesday – I could have read it in the first pages of the final version of Facebook’s civil rights audit. Delivering on civil rights just can’t compete with Facebook’s passion to deliver for Donald Trump.
The truth is that Trump and Facebook need each other. Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, and its continuing weakness in the face of internationally driven election sabotage, contributed to Trump winning the 2016 election.In 2020, Facebook’s indulgent and laissez-faire policies have already enabled hateful harassment, rampant misinformation and disinformation, and the suppression of Black organizers.
As a company, Facebook is incentivizing all the wrong behaviors. But that comes directly from Zuckerberg, who is feeding off of the Trumpian model of leadership. He acts as if he alone has all the answers and doesn’t need to listen to anyone else. He acts as if he alone should be all powerful, without any accountability, able to deny the reality of the very problems he causes. And he acts as if he alone is the sole arbiter of what’s true and what’s fake, and what’s just and unjust, despite alarms raised by countless social justice organizations (and a growing roster of corporations).
What has he decided? That civil rights abuses are just part of the game of politics, another chip to play for profit. And that drives decision-making and policy across the entire corporation, just as Trump’s values and whims now cascade as perverse mandates and norms across our entire government.
Trump and Zuckerberg are truly made for each other. Only Trump could say there are “very fine people on both sides” of a racist hate rally. And only Zuckerberg could say that there are two legitimate sides to calculated and manipulative lies, racially targeted voter suppression, and calls for violence against Black people. Whatever keeps you in power.
But it’s a love triangle. Because Facebook also loves its advertisers, and they are increasingly joining the boycott over Facebook’s systemic and continuous fueling of online hate speech. (Let alone Facebook’s algorithmic amplification of hateful attacks and lies.) Even major corporate advertisers are fed up with having their ads show up next to white nationalist content, implying to the world that they’re sponsoring it, and then have their concerns go ignored by someone acting like a king.
So who will Zuckerberg choose? What will show us that he’s not just the Silicon Valley version of Trump?
When people like Zuckerberg partner with powerful people like Trump to help them become even more powerful, we all lose freedom. Facebook ushered in a new era of social expression, but when there are different rules for Trump and the powerful than there are for the rest of us, none of our freedoms are actually safe.
Facebook has specifically written rules to accommodate Trump’s misinformation and instigation on its platforms (which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp). Zuckerberg may ask Trump to be nicer, or tone it down, after Trump violates the rules. But then he’ll decide to leave up his rule-violating and dangerous content. Zuckerberg, in fact, is one of the only friends Trump has left. The deep codependency between Facebook and the White House cannot be papered over by Facebook’s toothless promises to improve, or its empty messages of solidarity with Black people.
Seeing Facebook cut the number of their content moderators is not an encouraging sign, especially given the hundreds of thousands of misses they make every day, the terrible conditions moderators work under already,
and how some of the current moderation policies can serve to amplify white people’s hate speech while actually suppressing Black voices.
Facebook has a record of stopping internal efforts to mitigate the growth of extremism on the platform. An internal report in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to the recommendation tools and that most of the activity came from Facebook’s ‘Groups You Should Join’ and ‘Discover’ algorithms.” Yet, two short years later, in the 2018 presentation referenced above, managers told employees that “the company’s priorities were shifting away from societal good to individual value,” meaning that Facebook would not regulate hostile posts as long as it “doesn’t violate the company’s rules”. Of course, the rules are often so vague as to even allow for someone as clumsy as Trump to weave right through them. And of course, all of this deliberate vagueness and all of these loopholes come right from the top.
Zuckerberg sees white nationalism – and racism in general – as a political issue of right versus left, instead of a moral issue of right versus wrong.
It should be no surprise, given the people Zuckerberg has chosen to fill his leadership ranks. Senior policy team members Joel Kaplan, Kevin Martin and Katie Harbath all have a track record of rightwing politics that can only lead to preferential decision-making within the government relations and public policy portfolios they oversee. These conservatives are weaponizing the company’s news process to allow rightwing outlets to dictate what is and isn’t truth. How else does Breitbart News become a “trusted news source” despite working with known white nationalists and neo-Nazis? How else does Facebook assign the Daily Caller – a notorious misinformation platform started (and, until recently, mostly owned) by Tucker Carlson – to be an official factchecker with the power to label stories false?
While Zuckerberg may appeal to lofty ideas of free expression – ideas he quotes back to Black civil rights leaders without irony, let alone care for the routine suppression of their speech that he himself enables – the game is really about one thing. Keeping Trump happy. That is the standard that these leaders have systematized in terms of corporate practice, and only a new approach to leadership will change that system.
There’s no way to reason or argue with Mark Zuckerberg. And it doesn’t matter how much the law is on the side of justice, or how much evidence shows that Facebook isn’t. The only thing we can do to protect ourselves from the Zuckerberg-Trump relationship is to make Facebook accountable for the side they’ve chosen.
Rashad Robinson is the president of ColorOfChange and a Guardian US columnist
Facebook has a record of stopping internal efforts to mitigate the growth of extremism on the platform