We can't allow Facebook to play God
Hold it accountable for lies, not for society’s ills
CAPITALISM offers an optimal paradigm to organize a virtuous society’s economic affairs. But virtue is a precondition for capitalism, not a product of it, and no modern phenomenon better highlights that distinction than the rise of addictive social-media platforms.
This past week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Facebook’s knowledge of the harmful impact of its Instagram platform on teen girls; on Facebook’s role in promoting anger on its platform; on Facebook’s weak response to employee-reported drug-cartel and human-trafficking activity on its platform; on how the Facebook platform thwarted Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to promote COVID-19 vaccinations; and on Facebook’s “XCheck” program, which exempts high-profile accounts and VIP users from Facebook’s enforcement actions. More stories are still forthcoming.
It’s easy to criticize Facebook for these apparent failures, but we should pause to assess what we as a society should hold Facebook accountable for — and not.
The real problem with Facebook’s behavior is the revelation of its rampant institutional lying. In the XCheck story, we learned that after Facebook spent more than $130 million to create an Independent Oversight Board to oversee its content-moderation decisions, Facebook executives routinely lied to that board. Facebook told the Oversight Board that XCheck was only used in “a small number of decisions,” even though the program had grown to include 5.8 million users in 2020.
“We’re not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” and the company’s actions constitute a “breach of trust,” reads a confidential internal review done by Facebook.
We also learned — shockingly — that the CEO and COO of the trillion-dollar behemoth are regularly involved in decisions of what posts to remove when such posts are made by certain people who are exempted from Facebook’s community guidelines and content-moderation procedures. This is all while
Facebook asserted that it applied the same standards to everyone.
Apparently, XCheck was created to mitigate “p.r. fires” or negative media attentions when Facebook takes the wrong action against a high-profile VIP. Even worse than the existence of the XCheck program was Facebook’s dishonesty about it, reflecting the state of mind of a company that knew it was doing something wrong — and still did it anyway.
These revelations strengthen the case that Facebook likely serves increasingly as the censorship arm of the US government, just as it does for other governments around the world.
In countries like India, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam, Facebook frequently removes posts at the behest of the government to deter regulatory reprisal. Here at home, we know that Mark Zuckerberg
and Sheryl Sandberg regularly correspond with US officials, ranging from e-mail exchanges with Dr. Anthony Fauci on COVID-19 policy to discussing “problematic posts” that “spread disinformation” with the White House.
If Zuckerberg and Sandberg are also directly making decisions about which posts to censor versus permit, that makes it much more likely that they are responsive to the threats and inducements from government officials.
That’s what we should find alarming about the Journal’s reporting. But we should separate that from blaming Facebook for the anger of its users or for the self-esteem of teenage girls who suffer from body-image issues. The underlying cultural problems that create the conditions for anger, hostility and psychological insecurity should be addressed through spheres of public life that go beyond the purview of a socialmedia company — through family, faith and civic engagement.
To be sure, Facebook and other platforms amplify our pre-existing cultural failures and psychological vulnerabilities. A revival of, say, faith in God might address those issues more effectively than anything Mark Zuckerberg might do on a given day. The flawed premise that it’s Facebook’s job to address these cultural failures through its platform reinforces the uniquely postmodern problem that we have relocated our faith to new gods.
Instagram has become a church for insecure teenage girls; Facebook has become a church for angry Americans. The Journal’s reporting indicts those churches for failing the faithful, whereas the real problem is that Facebook and Instagram should have never played the role of those churches in the first place.
Don’t like God? Fine — platonic virtue or civic identity can suffice. But our ability to find true meaning in the real world is a precondition for a healthy experience on the Internet. No Web site will ever fill our postmodern cultural void.
Yes, it’s true that Facebook magnifies our cultural failures, but assigning the responsibility to Facebook to fix these cultural problems wrongly empowers the very actors we should be stripping of social power instead.
Facebook deserves severe criticism for its rampant hypocrisy — claiming to make the world a better place while knowingly doing the opposite, and lying about its knowledge of it at every step along the way. It should be held liable both in the court of public opinion and in federal courts for its lies — drawing from legal doctrines of consumer fraud that punish companies for saying one thing and doing another, as well as doctrines of state action that recognize that private companies ought to be bound by the Constitution if they are working hand-in-glove with government actors to censor political speech that the government cannot itself censor.
The social-media giants should also be responsible for illegal activities they allow, like gun-running, drug sales and child pornography.
These actions would make Facebook less able to sway American democracy and dupe the public.
But forcing the company to assume responsibility for body image and anger-management issues will, ironically, make Facebook and other social-media players even more powerful in our culture. The government, through big-tech proxy, would soon control what we can and can’t say, politically and culturally. Is that really what we want?