Facebook's Oversight Board Just Reminded Us of What an Almighty Problem Facebook Is
"Marlboro's Council of Elders Says Marlboro Must Make a Permanent Decision on Its Own Menthol Ban Within Six Months" would be a weird headline to write because it would be obvious, in this hypothetical scenario, that a cigarette company is interested in continuing to sell people cigarettes regardless of the ramifications for their health and well-being. It's kind of the business model. This is why the government, composed of a group of people elected by citizens to make the rules we live by in our society, would probably need to get involved if we reached a consensus that tobacco companies should not be allowed to sell menthol cigarettes. Ideally, it would be Congress writing the rules, as opposed to the Executive Branch, as part of the federal government's constitutional prerogative to promote the general welfare.
And yet we all had to wait on Wednesday morning for the word to come down from Mount Olympus, where the Facebook Oversight Board was probably meeting, to learn whether Donald J. Trump would be allowed back on the platform to spew dangerous horseshit at people using his prodigious capabilities in that regard. Facebook initially banned Trump following his incitement of the mob that tried to stop a session of Congress on January 6 in which the Legislative Branch was set to confirm that he would soon leave power. He did this, with the help of friendly media outlets who were Just Asking Questions about "irregularities" that they were desperate to find, by yelling over and over again for months that the election would be, then was, rigged and stolen from him.
On Wednesday, the Facebook Supreme Court ruled that the ongoing risk of political violence should Trump be allowed to post on the platform justified his continued suspension. But the Board also found "it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension," and insisted "that Facebook review this matter to determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform. Facebook must complete its review of this matter within six months." Basically, they want Facebook to write up some actual rules for banning people and apply them universally. Good luck with that. In effect, they punted the Trump Call back to Facebook, Inc.
But there are more significant issues in play here. For one, as Kara Swisher pointed out, "While the Facebook Oversight Board is independent, it’s paid for by Facebook with members handpicked by Facebook in a system essentially created by Facebook." As everyone talks about Rulings and Decisions Being Upheld, this starts to sound like the Judicial Branch of the sovereign nation-state known as Facebook. This might be an accurate vision of the current state of affairs, where massive, many-tentacled multinational firms of this kind operate above the jurisdiction of any one country's government, but it is not a healthy one for the future. Trump is a disease, but Germany's Angela Merkel was right to express concern that communications platforms that are verging on public utilities in terms of their centrality to societal functioning were able to simply ban a sitting world leader based on their own (back-filled?) criteria. Then Mark Zuckerberg, god-king, farmed out responsibility for justifying that decision to his (independent!) Oversight Board to avoid the public-relations headache of having to continue justifying it himself.
There is no easy fix here, because while misinformation is an almighty problem on these platforms, they also have carved out a new space in our society between private firm and public utility. Yes, Facebook is a company that can decide not to serve certain customers based on their behavior. But is it really just a company? The government stepping in here presents First Amendment issues, but the free flow of informational-slop-for-profit is killing this society, and harming the people in it profoundly. Trump was not banned out of some anti-conservative bias at Facebook. Conservative pages dominate the platform—check the top-performing link posts today—in part because Facebook does not always apply its misinformation rules to these pages. In some cases, they removed "strikes" from bad actors to keep them in the batter's box. This is likely out of some combination of fear they'll be accused of bias and thirst for the incredible engagement that conservative crapola seems to get.
Growing the user base and user engagement—and reaping the financial rewards of doing so—is Facebook's concern here. This is an American corporation, after all. There is only one pillar of governance: maximizing shareholder value, which is easiest to do by getting bigger all the time. These measures to combat the informational pollution core to the business model seem primarily designed to try to keep the wolves—the growing contingent of lawmakers and activists from both parties who say they want to break up the Big Tech monopolies—at bay. Breaking up Facebook is simply an unacceptable outcome for Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to feel the power of his simultaneous control over the mined information of all Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp users as a kind of life force.
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You can tell this was the case from one paragraph in the Board's report—broken up here for your reading pleasure—in which they laid out all the ways that Facebook refused to cooperate with their Trial. Because it was not a real trial, there were and will be no consequences for this:
In this case, the Board asked Facebook 46 questions, and Facebook declined to answer seven entirely, and two partially. The questions that Facebook did not answer included questions about how Facebook’s news feed and other features impacted the visibility of Mr. Trump’s content; whether Facebook has researched, or plans to research, those design decisions in relation to the events of January 6, 2021; and information about violating content from followers of Mr. Trump’s accounts.
The Board also asked questions related to the suspension of other political figures and removal of other content; whether Facebook had been contacted by political officeholders or their staff about the suspension of Mr. Trump’s accounts; and whether account suspension or deletion impacts the ability of advertisers to target the accounts of followers. Facebook stated that this information was not reasonably required for decision-making in accordance with the intent of the Charter; was not technically feasible to provide; was covered by attorney/client privilege; and/or could not or should not be provided because of legal, privacy, safety, or data protection concerns.
Basically, Facebook refused to engage with whether core elements of its service and its business model allowed Trump and other bullshit merchants to thrive on the platform in exchange for the revenue generated by their presence and the engagement they generated. To do so would be to risk revealing that while Trump was and continues to be a major problem in and of himself, that problem may have been exacerbated by core features of the Facebook user experience. Trump is gone, but Ben Shapiro's dogshit offerings are all over today's Top 10 list.
The sad fact is that Facebook could ban Trump for eternity, just like cigarette companies could stop selling one kind of cigarettes, and both are still hurting your grandma. YouTube is still sucking your troubled teen down a misinfo rabbit hole. The Users are the product, or at least their attention is, to be sold to anyone seeking that attention. If that attention is kept by feeding them deranged—but engaging!—nonsense, then so be it. And it's not clear exactly how Congress can solve the problem. Just as there are concerns about these massive firms becoming nations unto themselves, there are concerns about the government telling a communications firm who and what is allowed around its products, which fundamentally funnel Speech—however healthy and useful it might be—around our society. All that said, though, I think most of us can agree that the last few months of a Trumpless User Experience has cut down on the second-hand smoke.
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