Social media: Facebook’s Trump problem
“Over to you, Mark Zuckerberg,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. In a muchanticipated ruling, Facebook’s independent Oversight Board last week upheld the social media giant’s indefinite suspension of former President Donald Trump for incendiary posts about the “stolen” election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but set a six-month deadline for Facebook either to reinstate Trump or make his ban permanent. Even more irksome for Zuckerberg—who set up the 20-member Oversight Board to relieve himself of these thorny questions—the decision on Trump must be articulated in a clear standard that applies equally to all of Facebook’s 2.8 billion users. Zuckerberg has said he doesn’t want to be “an arbiter of truth,” said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times, claiming Facebook is a neutral platform that merely hosts the free speech of its users and advertisers. But that’s just not true—witness the army of more than 15,000 “content moderators” he already employs to remove a daily flood of offensive, misleading, and inflammatory posts. Whether or not Trump’s account is reactivated, Facebook and other platforms must start policing their sites with “more consistency, transparency,” and genuine concern for our society.
The decision to extend Trump’s ban was utterly predictable, said Joe Concha in TheHill.com. As we saw during the 2020 election, when Facebook and Twitter engaged in “outright censorship” of reports on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, these companies are both “hopelessly biased” against conservatives. Liberals argue that these platforms are privately owned, and that the First Amendment only protects speech from government censorship. But with 86 percent of Americans now getting their news online—36 percent from Facebook specifically—Big Tech’s “Soviet-style squashing” of conservative voices makes this a “chilling time in our nation’s history.” Trump’s lies and incitement were indefensible, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But an even “graver threat to democracy” is letting unelected tech executives decide which political messages are fit for Americans to see.
The claim that Facebook has a bias against conservatives is laughable, said Adam Gabbatt in TheGuardian.com. In 2020, right-leaning Facebook posts averaged 9 billion “interactions,” compared with only 5 billion for left-leaning posts, and right-wing content from the Daily Wire, Fox News, and Trumpist conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino still dominates Facebook’s daily rankings. Although Trump rages about Facebook now, said Michael Kruse in Politico.com, he wouldn’t “have become president without it.” In 2016, Trump’s campaign used Facebook’s databases and algorithms to tailor messages with highly effective precision. In 2020, Trump was Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest advertiser—dropping more than $100 million on the presidential race. So how again is the site biased against conservatives?
Social media does have one indisputable bias, said Vivek Wadhwa in ForeignPolicy.com. These platforms make money from holding users’ attention, so their algorithms are designed to supply whatever material will elicit the strongest emotional response. That’s usually “the most dangerous, salacious, offensive, and generally destructive content.” Facebook’s corrosive domination of the public square “became untenable long ago,” said Will Oremus in The New York Times. If Zuckerberg can’t figure how to tame the Frankenstein monster he created, then our country must choose either to impose “stronger checks on its power” or break the company up.