Facebook politics
Claims of bias show why Internet service providers should follow net neutrality.
There were few “likes” but plenty of angry emoji when Gizmodo reported earlier this month that Facebook workers were suppressing conservative news stories in its “trending” section. According to the article, which sourced an anonymous former journalist who worked on the Facebook project, news curators would prevent stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering or Republican politicians from appearing in the prominent section at the top of every user’s page.
Facebook officials and other former news curators say the allegations are false, but that hasn’t stopped conservatives from expressing outrage, including a letter from Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
Editorial discretion is part of running any news business. Mother Jones and National Review are going to publish very different types of articles. What sets apart Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, however, was the pretense of an automatic, hands-off arbiter. Plenty of users thought that the trending articles they saw on the screen were dictated by an algorithm rather than people, who have their own conscious and unconscious biases.
Facebook has a First Amendment right to publish as it sees fit and Zuckerberg should feel free to play editor. However, users deserve to know what, exactly, they’re seeing.
“That’s just a matter of transparency and honesty, and there shouldn’t be any attempt to mislead the American public,” Thune said.
This call to conversation should apply to both people and programs. After all, algorithms have their own built-in biases.
Facebook and other social media companies are becoming an inescapable part of life, and their ubiquity combined with a lack of alternatives sometimes makes them look more like utilities than regular businesses. How much of our lives are being tracked and curated by online services that have little duty to transparency? What does the growth of social media mean for individual liberty and privacy? More elected officials need to start asking these questions.
There’s already plenty of other fights on this topic and, unfortunately, Republicans often find themselves on the other side.
The Federal Communications Commission is currently trying to maintain a longstanding net neutrality policy for Internet service providers. This rule states that broadband companies like Comcast and AT&T cannot prioritize certain websites that they like, or slow the ones they don’t like. If it had free rein, Comcast has a healthy incentive to promote its own MSNBC over Fox News. This wouldn’t be a problem in a robust market for broadband Internet access — folks could just replace their restrictive Internet service with a new one. However, only half of U.S. homes have only two choices for basic broadband service. A majority of homes only have a single choice for high-speed broadband. This isn’t a market. This is a monopoly, and it should be regulated like one.
What happens if one of these broadband providers decides that it wants to curate users’ experiences? The impact would be much bigger than Facebook’s trending stories, and Thune and his fellow senators should worry about this monopolistic power of Internet service providers to control the flow of information and commerce. The Internet currently serves as the world’s greatest free market, and net neutrality keeps it that way.
Texas’ own Ted Cruz, on the other hand, wants to click delete on an open Internet. The junior Republican senator has nonsensically deemed net neutrality, “Obamacare for the Internet.” But in the recent concerns over Facebook’s trending stories, conservatives have glimpsed into a future without net neutrality. It is a future we should work to avoid.