The Facebook disinformation virus needs a vaccine
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he’s “deeply shaken and disgusted” by President Donald Trump’s incendiary social media posts.
But don’t worry Mr. President, Zuckerberg isn’t actually going to use his power as Facebook’s founder to limit your ability to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation on the platform he invented.
That’s just not his business model.
Instead, Zuckerberg is trying to have it both ways: virtue signaling his personal disgust with Trump’s behavior while allowing Facebook to monetize it. Talk about disgusting.
Facebook is a monopoly, a sprawling, borderless behemoth that needs to be reined in before it destroys the foundation of our democracy: shared truth.
We are suffering through a once-in-a-century pandemic caused by an unseen virus while living with a disinformation virus that we can see — most often on Facebook — that sows deep divisions by erasing the edges of truth.
Disinformation, disguised as memes and news, has become so prominent in our public discourse that it is sending us and our democracy to the intensive care unit.
With Facebook, there is no social distancing. Simply logging on means exposure to fake cures, bogus news and foreign agents stoking our country’s divisions.
Some have looked to remedy this by breaking up the social media giant, but that won’t undo the damage already done. Nor will it protect us going forward.
No, we need to immunize ourselves from the disinformation virus, and Facebook should pay for the vaccine.
Facebook should be charged a Disinformation Consumption Fee for each of its U.S. users. For instance, a surcharge of $40 annually would generate at least $6 billion to fight disinformation. We can no longer allow a 36-year-old billionaire to rule over a global town square of 2.5 billion people like a feudal lord selling megaphones to truth-tellers and disinformation agents alike, drawing no distinction between the two.
There’s precedent for such an initiative. Under a 1998 settlement agreement with states, major tobacco companies contributed billions of dollars to state budgets and funded anti-smoking public service announcements, helping reduce smoking rates to their lowest levels in almost a century.
Like Big Tobacco, Zuckerberg has chosen to put profits before truth, spreading disease throughout the land and refusing to take responsibility for the damage he’s caused.
If Zuckerberg was really disgusted by divisiveness, he would have acted on Facebook’s own research that the social media platform was driving people apart.
The Wall Street Journal reported that a Facebook team’s internal report concluded that “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
Presented with this evidence, Zuckerberg shelved it. All so Facebook can continue to make billions selling disinformation and divisiveness.
He is responsible for helping to tear the country apart and he knows it.
Disinformation, like terrorism, is a mortal threat to our democracy. After 9/11, Congress created a commission to find out what went wrong and to prevent it from ever happening again.
We need Congress to act again, this time creating a bipartisan panel to make recommendations on how to structure a Disinformation Consumption Fee to raise and spend the billions needed to educate Americans on how to fight this insidious threat.
If Zuckerberg won’t do it himself, we need to do it for him. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.