The blowback from Mark Zuckerberg’s October speech at Georgetown came down fast and furious. Aaron Sorkin hated it. So did Sasha Baron Cohen. The condemnation ranged from cynical (that Facebook only cares about money), to the disingenuous, to the charge that he simply refuses to see the dark side of his own creation. Like a social media Scarface, Zuckerberg has gotten “high on his own supply.”
The moral clarity of the outrage towards Zuckerberg can make it seem like passing a law to rein him in would be easy. But in the United States, you don’t just have the polarized gridlock in Congress to go up against, but also a Supreme Court that has only grown more conservative since the 2010 Citizens United decision. So even if a bill did manage to get signed into law, it probably wouldn’t withstand a challenge on First Amendment grounds. With these dim political prospects, I think Mark Zuckerberg might actually be our best hope.
Zuckerberg probably wouldn’t lie to his shareholders, so I take him at his word when he says political ads don’t make up a significant source of Facebook’s revenue. Therefore, it’s a bit over-simplistic to say that Facebook’s hands-off approach to political advertising is just about money. And if it’s between Zuckerberg being disingenuous versus him being blinded by technological optimism, then I’ll take blindness. Because at least then he’s making his arguments in good faith. And if that’s the case, there’s a chance he can be given the rhetorical equivalent of corrective LASIK surgery.
Consistency, Consistency
Zuckerberg already conceded that free speech is not the overriding universal value on Facebook. That happened three years ago when they began fact-checking news stories. With their new fact-checking apparatus in place, engagement would not be the only value powering their newsfeed feature. Rather, false stories would be down-weighted by the algorithm in the interest of a well-informed populace.
So the real question is: why does the interest of a well-informed populace not apply to political advertising? At Georgetown, Zuckerberg said Facebook doesn’t limit a politician’s speech in the same way “because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”
The same idea came up in his exchange with Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Speaking hypothetically, Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t take down a deceptive ad put up by the Congresswoman because it would be important for her constituents to see “that [she] had lied.”
This presupposes that people generally figure out the truth on their own. But given confirmation bias, and the sticky-ness of fake news, that’s a dubious premise. Besides, if politicians didn’t think the chances were good that voters would believe their lies, then they probably wouldn’t lie.
You could maintain that it comes down to a question of respect for people and their own judgment. But it’s not that simple. Because there is still the fact that Facebook makes the decision about what is shown to people and how it is arranged. And there is no way for that decision to be neutral. To this, maybe Zuckerberg would say, “Okay, well my value is to expose people to as many viewpoints as possible.” But if that is the case, then Facebook shouldn’t be doing any fact-checking at all. Because lies also qualify as a point of view.
Now the Hard Part
Zuckerberg’s critics often invoke journalist Edward R. Murrow’s maxim, that we “cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” It’s a solid sentiment, but as Zuckerberg oversees the moderation of public discourse, he’s probably more interested in how to operationalize it. Which stories are beyond the pale? How does one—or more relevantly, how does the algorithm—decide?
The argument that Facebook and other Internet content platforms made earlier in this decade—that they are simply dumb pipes serving as a conduit for the wisdom of the crowd/market forces or whatever you want to call it—no longer holds much water. But if that’s the position they want to occupy, there is a way for them to get back behind the bulwark of that argument: let the people program the algorithm.
Facebook might be using fact-checkers in principle, but in practice those fact-checkers often complain that Facebook isn’t transparent enough about the impact of their work. Facebook should instead be doubling down on transparency here, giving nearly full control of the fake news down-weighting levers in their newsfeed algorithm over to the panel of vetted fact-checking organizations. Only then can they rightfully claim that they really are just “dumb pipes” reflecting our own collective preferences as a society back at us.
For such a system to have legitimacy, it is vital that the panel include a balance of left-leaning and right-leaning fact-checking organizations. Facebook already does this for the six fact-checking organizations it works with in the United States, and the results have not been without controversy. But it’s possible the only satisfactory system is one where everyone is a bit unsatisfied. Fact-checkers can have differing agendas, but the most important thing is that they stick to the standards of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). A peer voting system could be instituted to assess the continued membership of each fact-checking organization, with Facebook only getting involved to cast tie-breaking votes—like the Vice President does in the Senate.
Go Big or Go Home
I’m under no illusions that the system I describe, in which fact-checking organizations would have direct control over Facebook’s algorithm, would still be loud and messy. But it would be an improvement—not just over Facebook’s inconsistent status-quo strategy, but also over what existed before Facebook ever became the modern-day version of the public square.
At Georgetown, Zuckerberg said that “political advertising is more transparent on Facebook than anywhere else.” And that’s true. Their searchable political ad archive is much more user-friendly than the API endpoints at OpenSecrets.org, the go-to source for journalists trying to wade through the muck of shadowy political advertising money that flows through America in the post-Citizens United world.
But Zuckerberg has much more work to do. And more than being greedy or insincere, I think his biggest problem is that his company is huge, slow-to-react, and risk-averse. Particularly as he positions himself as a global ambassador of American values, it behooves him to overcome this organizational inertia and get things right at home before exporting those values abroad. But if he’s not willing to put in the work to get political ad fact-checking right, then he should just follow Twitter’s example and pull them off completely.
Published on December 15, 2019