Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to have little idea of what lay ahead when he appeared before the US Congress’ Financial Services Committee earlier this week. With her customary directness, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez homed in on Facebook’s laissez-faire attitude towards fact-checking political ads which appear on its site. Instead of a long explanation, Ocasio-Cortez offered a vivid hypothetical. “Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal? … I’m just trying to understand the bounds here.” With growing discomfort Zuckerberg tried to sidestep the question – “I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” – but then he conceded: “I think, probably.”
Zuckerberg likes to hide Facebook’s ethical lapses behind a banner of free speech, but Ocasio-Cortez was having none of it. “So you won’t take down lies, or you will take down lies?” she asked. “I think that’s a pretty simple yes or no. I’m not talking about spin — I’m talking about actual disinformation.” Weakly Zuckerberg countered: “Congresswoman, this is a democracy. I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not have voted for are saying and judge their character for themselves.” Ocasio-Cortez then pivoted to another point of contention, asking about Facebook’s partnership with a subsidiary of The Daily Caller, a news agency whose former editor was forced to resign after being exposed as a blogger for a publication founded by ‘alt-right’ leader Richard Spencer. Rather than rebut the white nationalist associations of his fact-checkers, Zuckerberg noted that Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, which used “a rigorous standard” to vet its partners had chosen the company’s fact-checkers. By this point there was more anxiety than conviction in Zuckerberg’s voice and demeanour.
Zuckerberg has faced other embarrassments. Democratic front-runner Elizabeth Warren recently demonstrated the folly of Facebook’s agnostic approach to political ads by targeting him directly. Her campaign ran an ad which mischievously claimed, under a “Breaking News” headline that Zuckerberg and his company had “just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.” Anticipating an incredulous reaction, Warren’s ad continued “You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking, ‘how could this possibly be true?’ Well, it’s not. (Sorry.) … But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform – and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.”
Last month, Zuckerberg described Warren’s anti-trust wariness of America’s giant tech firms as an “existential threat” that he would “go to the mat” to defeat. His record since then suggests that the gap between his colossal sense of entitlement and any actual ability to wrestle critics into submission may be wider than previously thought. In a recent speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg repeated the old argument that Facebook had given people a voice and reach which they previously lacked. He claimed the company had been inspired by campus protests against the Iraq war – in fact it arose from online polls which asked users to ogle photos of young women and rate them ‘hot or not’ – and he alleged that: “[t]hose early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.”
This tactical appeal to free speech is, at best, disingenuous nonsense. Facebook knows that its algorithms do little to facilitate free speech, and it chooses instead to prioritise content that ‘engages’ its massive online audience – often through hate or fear – rather than boosting information that serves the public interest. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, multiple privacy breaches and a huge body of other evidence has shown that the net effect of amplifying provocative voices, as Facebook has repeatedly chosen to do, increases social and political strife, undermines belief in and the reliability of the digital public sphere, and exposes social media users to hordes of data mining companies which harvest their behavioural data for what is aptly known as “surveillance capitalism.”
A third political critic who has put Facebook and Zuckerberg on notice is the EU commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager who recently called on Apple to pay €13bn (US$14.5bn) in unpaid Irish taxes, and levied a €1.5bn fine against Google for abusive advertising practices. When asked about Facebook Vestager said she would prefer “a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month [in exchange for] no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of privacy.”
These setbacks for Facebook are a welcome sign that the company’s long record of steamrollering over any obstacles to its growth may be nearing an end. Democratic institutions have long struggled to keep pace with the speed at which tech companies reinvent the ways we access and consume the news, but lately it seems that the absent oversight which has allowed these companies to lay claim to the digital world like conquering armies is finally coming to a close.
