When algorithms attack!
Facebook made money from Capitol siege
DID FACEBOOK AMPLIFY TRUMP TO GET MORE CLICKS? — DE SOUZA
The supreme court released its ruling in the matter of Facebook and the Capitol siege. Not Supreme Court. The Facebook “supreme court”. Reading between the lines, it was an indictment of how Big Tech, not entirely unlike Big Tobacco before it, is more than complicit in the malign effects resulting from the voluntary use of its product.
What’s the Facebook supreme court? In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook itself did not want to be the final arbiter in matters of free speech on its platform. It was an acknowledgment that Facebook is not a regular company, facing the discipline of the market while striving against other competitors. Facebook is more like the old telephone monopoly; shutting down an account is akin to cutting off access to the phones, which was tantamount in an earlier time to denying access to the mails.
So Facebook set up the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB), giving it a trust fund of $130 million to provide some kind of independence. The twenty members (selected by Facebook) were the sort of grandees that one usually finds on an eminent persons UN panel looking into this or that. There is Sudhir Krishnawamy, vice chancellor of the National Law School of India University, for example, and Helle Thorning-schmidt, the first woman prime minister of Denmark who went on to serve as chief executive of Save the Children.
The FOB was asked to investigate Facebook’s ban of President Donald Trump after the lethal violence at the Capitol. More than 9,000 submissions were received from the public, and the ruling was handed down on May 6.
The board upheld Trump’s suspension for violating Facebook’s standards, but said that Facebook was wrong to make it “indefinite.” The suspension should have a fixed duration and clear conditions under which it would be lifted. Facebook has six months, should it choose to honour the FOB ruling, to figure that out.
The ruling is another acknowledgment that Facebook is more a public utility than a private company; a criminal convicted of running an illegal grow-op would not be banned indefinitely from buying electricity in the future.
So far, rather unremarkable. But there was more, which got relatively less attention. The FOB lacks subpoena power; it is an internal auditor which can only report if it didn’t see what it needed to see. It did just that.
“The Board asked Facebook 46 questions, and Facebook declined to answer seven entirely, and two partially,” the ruling states. “The questions that Facebook did not answer included questions about how Facebook’s news feed and other features impacted the visibility of Mr. Trump’s content.”
The FOB concluded that Trump was responsible for Trump, but did Facebook amplify Trump to get more clicks for advertising revenue?
“The Board sought clarification from Facebook about the extent to which the platform’s design decisions, including algorithms, policies, procedures and technical features, amplified Mr. Trump’s posts after the election and whether Facebook had conducted any internal analysis of whether such design decisions may have contributed to the events of January 6,” the FOB writes. “Facebook declined to answer these questions.”
Certainly they did. Trump’s mastery of social media in the 2016 election, outmanoeuvring the vastly better-funded Hillary Clinton campaign, was deeply embarrassing to Silicon Valley. Kingpins of the corporate class, they contributed cataracts of campaign cash to Clinton; meanwhile Trump used their very own platforms to eat her lunch.
They resolved that would never happen again, which is why Big Tech blocked at least one major news story to favour Joe Biden and disadvantage Trump during the campaign. That was politics. What about making money?
Did Facebook’s own business model assist Trump in promoting the “Stop the Steal” social media campaign, alleging a fraudulent election?
When the FOB inquired about “design decisions, including algorithms, policies, procedures and technical features” it was asking about Facebook’s core identity. It put the question: Does Facebook facilitate, promote and profit from radicalization? Is it designed to do just that?
“Facebook declined to answer.”
You bet it did. The FOB report makes it clear that Facebook could have made it much more difficult for the “Stop the Steal” movement to organize the siege of the Capitol.
Outrage attracts eyeballs, an echo chamber of carefully chosen reactions keeps you scrolling. The algorithm is designed so that Facebook hoovers up advertising dollars; facilitating a Trump rally is as good a way to do that as any. And it wasn’t just Big Tech; televising Trump rallies was a ratings bonanza for cable networks, including the liberal ones which denounced him otherwise.
The politics of Big Tech are complicated. Liberals benefit massively from the billionaires’ largesse — one of them, Michael Bloomberg, even ran for the Democratic presidential nomination himself. At his fortnightly comments upon the latest mass shooting, President Biden customarily calls for greater regulation of the gun industry, holding them partially responsible for what their customers do.
Should Big Tech get the same treatment?