The day after the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, Facebook suspended Donald Trump’s account indefinitely. Two things about this decision are interesting. The first is that, as Will Oremus pointed out in a perceptive post, the decision was “an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying and defending. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along.”
In this context, Facebook’s contorted decision-making about Trump throughout his presidency has been beyond parody. “The only thing that has been consistent, until now,” observes Oremus, “is Facebook’s determination to contort, hair-split and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them.” In the end, it took the president inciting his followers to sack the Capitol to convince Zuckerberg and co that “the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government”.
The second interesting thing about the decision is that, after the predictable outrage at the decision from Trump supporters, Facebook then kicked the question of whether the ban should be permanent into the long grass, which in this case is its self-appointed “oversight board”.
This board (originally talked about within Facebook as a “supreme court”) is both a manifestation of preposterous hubris on the part of what is, after all, merely a commercial company and a cunning stunt by said company to avoid taking corporate responsibility for difficult decisions. It consists of up to 40 bigwigs, allegedly carefully chosen (“six in-depth workshops and 22 round tables, attended by more than 650 people from 88 different countries”) but who look awfully like the kind of longlist that might be produced by a high-end corporate headhunter. It includes, for example, a former prime minister of Denmark, nine professors, one vice-chancellor and a former editor of the Guardian. Such eminent worthies, of course, cannot be expected to work for nothing, so, according to the New York Times, they receive at least $100,000 (£73,000) a year for a commitment of 15 hours a week.
Inspection of linguistic clues on the board’s website does not inspire confidence in its supposed collective IQ or independence. It is, it says, all about “ensuring respect for free expression, through independent judgment”. And, as regards its founder (and funder), it observes: “As its community grew to more than 2 billion people, it became increasingly clear to the Facebook company that it shouldn’t be making so many decisions about speech and online safety on its own.”
This looks awfully like Facebook PR-speak. Its claim that the board’s role concerns free speech is baloney. It’s about what people are allowed to say in a private shopping mall owned by a global corporation. Banning Trump from Facebook is not constraining his right to free expression. There is nothing stopping the former president from starting his own website or his own social network, come to that. The decision is about whether Trump should again have access to Facebook’s algorithmically curated public-address system. What most people in this controversy seem to forget is that, as Renée DiResta observed in a memorable article, “free speech is not the same as free reach”.
Then there’s the telltale burbling about Facebook’s “community”. This is a favourite theme of Mark Zuckerberg’s, embarrassingly outlined in 2017 in a vapid 5,000-word blogpost entitled Building Global Community. Facebook’s nameless hordes may be many things, but they are not a “community” in any meaningful sense of the term and it’s not exactly reassuring to find members of its notional supreme court spouting the same nonsense.
But the bottom line is that this is actually not about Trump at all: it’s about untrammelled monopoly power, specifically Facebook’s monopoly control of the virtual railway line that ferries ideas and information into people’s heads. In that sense, the company’s algorithmic curation of people’s news feeds (and the advertisements they are shown) has become part of the infrastructure of our public sphere, as two Harvard scholars, John Simons and Dipayan Ghosh argued in an interesting paper titled Utilities for Democracy last year, and it needs to be regulated accordingly. Arguing about whether Trump should be allowed back is like arguing about which kinds of freight can run on a railway, when the real question is: who owns the track? Sooner or later, that’s the question we will have to address and the Facebook “oversight” board should have no jurisdiction there. That’s for real democratic institutions, backed by legal muscle, to decide.
What I’ve been reading
Adding up grief
Boris Johnson says one cannot compute the sorrow of 100,000 deaths. In a remarkable post on the Covid2020diary blog, the social historian David Vincent begs to differ.
Snap judgment
There’s a reflective essay on investor and photographer Om Malik’s blog about why the iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie camera.
Club gossip
There’s a fine piece by Seth Thévoz on the openDemocracy site about the secret history of Trump’s Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago.
January 31, 2021 at 04:14AM
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/30/forget-the-furore-over-trump-facebook-is-interested-only-in-maintaining-its-monopoly
Forget the furore over Trump - Facebook is interested only in maintaining its monopoly - The Guardian
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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