Our view: Facebook doesn’t have to spread political lies
A Rolling Stone magazine writer once called the Goldman Sachs investment house a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
A compelling image, to be sure. But if there is a metaphorical cephalopod nourishing itself at society’s expense, it is not Goldman Sachs but, rather, Facebook. Just 15 years after its founding in a college dorm, and without producing any actual content to speak of, Facebook has become the most powerful global media organization in history.
The company genuinely worries that it could be the platform on which revolution or civil war in some tinderbox of a country breaks out.
And, despite its rising unpopularity, it has designs on managing the world’s cryptocurrency.
Yet for all its wealth and influence, for all it has done to alter the public discussion, and for all its global ambitions, Facebook says it can’t, or won’t, factcheck politicians’ ads that run on its platform.
In a speech at Georgetown University this month, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrapped himself in the First Amendment, saying, “The most repressive societies have always restricted speech the most.”
This is, of course, a cop-out of the first order — something that several hundred Facebook employees have noted in a letter to Zuckerberg.
The issue is not whether government should tell Facebook what to do. It is, rather, whether Facebook should act reasonably and responsibly on its own to avoid being in the garbage distribution business. The American people, for their part, will surely not want the dominant social media company serving as a megaphone for peddling lies, wacko conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation.
To be clear, this debate isn’t about whether Facebook needs to check on the accuracy of everything that its millions of users post.
Rather, it is whether it should place some minimal standards on the accuracy of advertisements.
Facebook has gotten to where it is, as an omnipresent company worth about half a trillion dollars, in part by siphoning advertising away from digital publications and television stations. By and large, these institutions fact-check political ads.
A law dating to 1934 (which is outdated in today’s multimedia world) requires broadcast stations to run ads from candidates as is. This does not apply to cable, satellite, wireless or the internet. The norm on these media is to grant politicians wide latitude with attack ads, but to not run those that are demonstrably and blatantly false.
It’s easy to see why Facebook would rather not try to police political discourse. Doing so can be controversial. It requires human judgment, not just algorithms. It is costly to be responsible. Rather than shelling out the money, Facebook tries to convince us that there is virtue in its irresponsibility.