Slap in the Facebook
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi paused from wrapping up President Trump’s impeachment this week to excoriate a “very irresponsible” fellow Bay Area power broker, Facebook, telling reporters, “All they want are their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them.” To be fair, this roughly describes what many American corporations want from the government. The trouble with the tech company most likely to be compared to a carcinogen is its disproportionate, unchecked and, as it turns out, jealously guarded role in determining the shape of that government.
Pelosi, DSan Francisco, comes by her outrage personally: Last year, Facebook refused to remove a viral video clip of the speaker that had been altered to make her seem drunk or debilitated. The company recently codified that error as corporate policy when it refused to do much of anything about its capacity to distribute and target false information in a manner ideally suited to the goals of, say, the Kremlin. The company has acknowledged that Russian agents reached 126 million Facebook users over two years spanning the 2016 presidential campaign as they sought to elect Trump and otherwise aggravate divisions among Americans.
With the Russians and other foreign governments preparing a repeat performance, some tech titans felt pressure to reform. Twitter last fall announced that it would ban many political advertisements and limit the targeting of others; Google also reined in political advertisers’ ability to pick particular populations.
Not Facebook. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has fiercely defended the freedom of misinformation, and the company doubled down on that approach this month by refusing to restrict the content or targeting of political ads. The Menlo Parkbased behemoth instead announced that it would give users more control over what messages they see — a classic case of Big Tech irresponsibility masquerading as customer empowerment.
Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth expounded upon this philosophy in a recently leaked disquisition arguing that the company must refrain from using its power to defeat Trump despite his personal desire that the president not be reelected. In a botched “Lord of the Rings” allusion that suggested he saw the movies but didn’t read the books, Bosworth compared the company to the One Ring whose sheer power corrupts its users regardless of the best intentions.
Followed to its conclusion, Bosworth’s analogy recommends, perhaps inadvertently, that Facebook be hurled into a volcano. It also makes a case against a straw man: No one is saying Facebook should use its influence to defeat Trump, only that it should refrain from promoting electionswaying disinformation of any kind. Not doing so invites suspicions of an unsavory trade for handsoff treatment by the administration.
The speaker’s criticism suggests Facebook is on a collision course with a critical mass of public disaffection and congressional will to grapple with its most corrosive consequences. The company apparently prefers to keep it that way.