Biden's path to the White House could hit a dead end on Facebook
Way back in June, I wrote a column under the headline: “One man stands between Joe Biden and the US presidency – Mark Zuckerberg”. Trump, flailing against the pandemic at the time, was trailing Biden in the polls, just as at the same point in 2016 he had been trailing Hillary Clinton. And yet we know what happened that November: Trump’s team made inspired use of Facebook’s targeting engine to suppress Democratic turnout in key states – and it worked. What is perhaps less well known is that Facebook offered to “embed” employees for free in the campaign offices of both candidates to help them use the platform effectively. Clinton’s campaign refused the offer. Trump’s crowd accepted, and Facebook employees helped his campaign craft the messages that may have clinched the election.
So here we are in 2020, 100 days from the presidential election. Trump is still trailing Biden. But his base support has remained solid. So the point I made in June still stands: if he is to win a second term, Facebook will be his only hope – which is why his campaign is betting the ranch on it. And if Facebook were suddenly to decide that it would not allow its platform to be used by either campaign in the period from now until 3 November, Trump would be a one-term president, free to spend even more time with his golf buggy – and perhaps his lawyers.
For Facebook read Zuckerberg, for Facebook is not just a corporate extension of its founder’s personality, but his personal plaything. I can’t think of any other tech founder who has retained such an iron grip on his creation through his ownership of a special class of shares, which give him total control. The passage in the company’s SEC filing detailing this makes for surreal reading. It says that Zuckerberg “has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support.”
Such a concentration of power in the hands of a single individual would be a concern in any enterprise, but in a global company that effectively controls and mediates much of the world’s public sphere it is distinctly creepy. This impression is reinforced vividly whenever Zuckerberg has to make a public appearance, especially when he has to wear a suit – as he did when appearing before US Congress in April 2018. On such occasions he can look like a tailor’s dummy, a man whose sense of humour has been surgically removed at birth.
This caricature, wrote Evan Osnos in an absorbing New Yorker profile, is that of an automaton with little regard for the human dimensions of his work. “The truth is something else: he decided long ago that no historical change is painless. Like [the emperor] Augustus, he is at peace with his trade-offs. Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale. His life thus far has convinced him that he can solve ‘problem after problem after problem’, no matter the howling from the public it may cause.”
People who have dealt or worked with Zuckerberg come away with different images of him, but all seem to agree that he’s some kind of hyper-rationalist. When he encounters a theory that doesn’t accord with his own, says Osnos, who spent some time with him, “he finds a seam of disagreement – a fact, a methodology, a premise – and hammers at it. It’s an effective technique for winning arguments, but one that makes it difficult to introduce new information. Over time, some former colleagues say, his deputies have begun to filter out bad news from presentations before it reaches him.”
One of the great puzzles about Zuckerberg is how such an apparently bright individual can apparently be so ignorant about how cultures and societies work. In February 2017, for example, he published a 5,500-word manifesto on Building Global Community. It began: “History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers – from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
“Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global – like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses – like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.”
There’s lots more in that vacuous vein. The solution to the world’s troubles, it seemed, was to have everyone in the world as a member of Facebook’s “community” (a favourite Zuckerberg term). When I showed this essay to a colleague who teaches politics (and who was hitherto blissfully unaware of Zuckerberg) he read it with growing incredulity. “If a first-year undergraduate had submitted this,” he remarked, “I’d have sent him home.” The thought that the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful corporations could write such piffle seemed astounding to him.
It is. But we are where we are. And there is another, contemporary dimension to the puzzle, namely that the company Zuckerberg controls seems to have the power to influence people’s behaviour in politically relevant ways. We have empirical evidence for this. In 2014, for example, a massive experiment on 689,000 Facebook users showed that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. And in the 2010 mid-term elections in the US, a campaign by Facebook to increase voter turnout, carried out by researchers who ran an experiment involving 61 million users, reckoned that 340,000 extra people turned out to vote because of a single electionday Facebook message.
In themselves, these experiments may seem innocuous (though the “emotional contagion” study raised some ethical concerns). After all, encouraging people to go out and vote is an admirable thing to do. The real significance of the experiments, though, was their indication that Facebook had the capacity to influence people’s behaviour and emotions in ways that could conceivably have a political impact. Which leads to the question of whether Facebook could, if its corporate interests required it, put a thumb on the electoral scales in marginal seats.
Even in the hyper-polarised world of contemporary US politics, that seems unlikely. But that hasn’t stopped people scrutinising Zuckerberg’s recent utterances and behaviour in relation to Trump. When Twitter took the unprecedented step of labelling some of the president’s more incendiary tweets, and Trump threatened to revoke the immunity offered to social media platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, who should turn up on the president’s favourite news channel but Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “private companies shouldn’t be the arbiters of truth”? And then there were the two visits Zuckerberg paid to the White House in September and October last year. No smoke without fire, and all that.
These might simply be signs of a corporate boss trying to stay out of trouble with the government of the day. But it still raises an intriguing question: is it conceivable that Zuckerberg might prefer a Trump victory to a Biden one? The answer might depend on whom Biden picks as his running mate. If he were to choose Elizabeth Warren, for example, my guess is that Facebook’s ad-targeting system and expertise would be at Trump’s disposal, possibly at a discount. Why? In a leaked recording of an internal Facebook discussion, Zuckerberg described Warren’s policy proposals on antitrust as “an existential threat” to his company. And, as General de Gaulle famously observed of nations, tech companies have no friends, only interests. Zuckerberg understands that as well as anyone. And it will govern his decisions in the next few months.