Social media giants empower election trolls
The trolls accosting Justin Trudeau at campaign stops across Canada are hardly the first to bring the worst of Facebook to real life.
“Death to Trudeau” memes have been dominant on Facebook for years. The guy who packed his truck full of guns and drove through the gates of Rideau Hall in search of the “traitor” Trudeau was neck deep in conspiracy theories on Facebook.
The convoy of petro-fanatics that descended on Ottawa in 2019 sporting signs reading “Oil in the pipe, Trudeau in the ground” used the same language. And wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that the Conservative party slapped Trudeau’s face onto the body of Veruca Salt performing her famous tantrum in Willy Wonka’s factory? What’s not to hate?
That so many in the media are asking how we came to this shows how uninformed Canadians are about the harms of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Promoting indignation isn’t an accidental side effect of their work. It’s their core business.
A 2017 Pew Research Center study found posts expressing “indignant disagreement” garnered 50 per cent more likes, twice as many shares, and three times as many comments as those expressing bipartisanship or solidarity.
Each like, share and comment equals money for Facebook and company, creating a natural incentive to foment as much outrage as possible.
Facebook’s Canadian minion, Kevin Chan, recently claimed, without verification, that Facebook will reduce the prevalence of political content in Canadians’ newsfeeds to enhance “election integrity” (Republicans use the same term to impugn the legitimacy of elections). I have my doubts. The last time Facebook promised to secure an election, the result was a mob assault on the U.S. Capitol, largely organized on Facebook.
Multiple whistleblowers within Facebook call Chan’s statements into question. When engineers found a way to reduce the prevalence of posts deemed “bad for the world,” Facebook’s policy team, of which Chan is global director, “vetoed” their implementation. When a data scientist identified widespread abuse of the platform in multiple elections worldwide and asked for help to combat it, Facebook told her “human resources are limited.”
In March, Chan exclaimed Facebook’s commitment to removing COVID-19 misinformation. We later learned that Facebook’s most viewed post in the first three months of 2021 was — you guessed it — COVID misinformation. And despite Chan’s noble utterances about reducing incivility online, especially against female candidates, his policy team broke Facebook’s own rules so right-wing firebrand Alex Jones would not be banned, allowing him to continue telling millions of followers that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped” children, for example.
In the information age, control of information is all-important. Do Canadians want the primary currency of our time to be governed by a disgraceful American company like Facebook and its unsavoury, unscrupulous local mandarins? The answer should be an emphatic “no” and I suggest the political parties take a tough stance on Facebook as an election issue.
Voters are clearly in favour of a crackdown on this rogue corporation.
Nanos polling for Friends shows 83 per cent of voters support (58 per cent) or somewhat support (25 per cent) holding platforms legally responsible for amplifying hateful or illegal content.
The Conservatives strenuously oppose social media regulation, but more than two-thirds of Conservative voters support it.
Social media companies push a false narrative that regulating platforms’ behaviour restricts free expression. Just four per cent of Canadians think social media strengthens democracy.
If we want to cut the trolls out of Canadian politics, we need to crack down on companies that make billions frothing us up. And we need to drop our trademark smugness vis-à-vis the U.S. It can happen here. It is happening here.
Canadian voters overwhelmingly support tough action against Facebook. Which party will deliver it?