Don't make social media tech bro billionaires the arbiters of truth

May 30, 2020

Don't make social media tech bro billionaires the arbiters of truth

Jack Dorsey Mark Zuckerberg

It's hard to believe that in an election year, during a pandemic and an economic catastrophe, we're talking about regulating Twitter. But thanks to Trump's latest executive order, we are.
The progressive left and the MAGA right both distrust Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. And yet for some reason they want both of them to be the online political speech police.
There's no perfectly morally-balanced apolitical genius — in Silicon Valley or government or anywhere else — that has the insight to fairly arbitrate what's a destructive lie or a typical politician's fib.
Twitter and Facebook's small measures at fact-checking will not make the internet a more honest place, but they're a better option than empowering extraordinarily rich, profit-driven business people as the gatekeepers for political speech.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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Twitter has brought some of the loudest elements of both the left and right together in a rare display of unity. Partisans of both the progressive left and the MAGA right really, really want social media to be heavily regulated.

Many liberals still blame Hillary Clinton's disastrous 2016 presidential campaign on anything but the campaign itself, focusing a great deal of their ire on Russian-bought disinformation and memes posted to Facebook. To stop the further spread of "fake news," they demand government intervention — or a sufficient threat of it — to cow social media platforms into self-regulation.

Trump-supporting conservatives believe they're being unfairly targeted by social media companies' enforcement of their rules on abuse, racism or information that could endanger public safety.

President Trump has made good on his threats to take on the big social media giants, signing an executive order that among other things would strip internet companies of the legal protections afforded to them under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230 long predates social media, but by protecting internet companies from being held liable for the user-generated content posted to their sites, it allowed the internet to evolve into what it is today. Put simply, there's no YouTube without Section 230.

Trump's EO seems to have little chance of surviving court challenges, and it's likely that end of Section 230 would mean many more banned accounts and deleted posts since companies would now be liable for the content posted to their sites.

This is beside the point, which is that Trump's use of blunt executive force was a direct result of Twitter's fact-checking of two of his tweets, where he spread misinformation about mail-in balloting.

It's hard to believe that in an election year, during a pandemic and an economic catastrophe, we're talking about regulating Twitter.

Both political wings should be careful what they wish for. Empowering a private corporation as the "arbiter of truth"— as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in an interview rejecting the idea that his company should become such an authority — is fraught with dangers of its own.

Why would anyone want Mark Zuckerberg to be the speech police?

Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed an FCC "news ombudsman" empowered with the force of the government to determine what was or was not fake news and to take punitive action accordingly, if so desired.

In several Business Insider interviews, Yang and I discussed his proposal. While he was not moved by my arguments, I expressed concern about the damage that could be done by a dishonest broker empowered as the judge and jury of the news. Someone like, say, Donald Trump, who considers anything short of worship to be "fake news."

There's also the simple matter of fact that no perfectly morally-balanced apolitical genius — in Silicon Valley or government or anywhere else — exists.

No pure-of-heart arbiter of truth is walking through that door. And Zuckerberg is certainly not that person.

Which is why it's baffling to watch liberal lawmakers both excoriate him and demand he have more power over the US' political conversation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Zuckerberg and Facebook "hide under freedom of speech" and pander to Trump's White House to avoid paying taxes.

Hillary Clinton called Zuckerberg "Trumpian" and "authoritarian."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused Facebook of having "ties to white supremacy-linked orgs and sympathy for disinformation campaigns" which she said "appears to come from the top."

And yet, all these people want, nay, demand that Mark Zuckerberg and his company fact-check political content.

For the record, Facebook already employs a fact-checking team that is hated and accused of bias by both the left and the right. But Facebook says it "exempts politicians" from its "third-party fact-checking program."

Sounds like a cop out, but if the other option is fact-checking politicians, it's the less-worse route.

Here's a few scenarios in a world where Facebook "fact-checks" politicians' speech

If a conservative insists "life begins at conception" or cites the Bible as evidence the Earth is only 6,000 years old, is that fake news in need of correction?

How about a Republican official mischaracterizing a political opponent's position on welfare benefits? When does the referee step in?

On the other side, imagine the very likely scenario of a Democratic politician sharing a post that says Michael Brown had his hands up and was saying "Don't shoot" when he was killed by Ferguson PD Officer Darren Wilson — a legend which persists despite being debunked by the Obama administration's Department of Justice. Is that a deliberately misleading political lie in need of correction or removal?

What if that same Democrat regularly got their facts wrong? Would those represent multiple "strikes," similar to the pattern of misbehavior that got Infowars' chemtrail-fearing impresario Alex Jones kicked off major platforms?

What if that Democrat is Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2019 lamented to "60 Minutes" that too many people are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right"?

When do incorrect facts become willful distortions endangering democracy? And is that a question you want tech bro billionaires to answer?

These are not possibilities that are far out of the realm of possibility, and they are not within the purview of Silicon Valley employees already inundated with filtering out grotesquely violent or pornographic imagery from social media sites.

In 2018, just after Alex Jones was purged from most of the big social media platforms for seemingly innumerable conduct violations, Ben Wizner, the director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, warned that whatever relief the Jones ban might provide would come with a cost.

"Do we really want corporations that are answerable to their shareholders and their bottom lines being the ones who decide which political speech Americans should see or not see? … Because that's what we're asking for here," Wizner told HuffPost.

Twitter can be as biased as it wants to be and the government has no right to do anything about it

Trump is a free speech tourist Trump threatening government intervention to bully private companies into bending to his will.

But the government has no right to demand "First Amendment principles" of a private business, and it's fairly ludicrous that conservatives who so hated the FCC's "fairness doctrine" rules requiring "equal time" for TV and radio political content are now demanding similar privileges in digital media.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media giants, have the right to maintain their platforms however they see fit. That includes politically biased treatment of content posted on their platforms, if that's how they want to run their business.

If they want to add fact-checks to politicians' posts, and they happen to police one side of the political aisle more than the other, so be it.

Twitter's newly-instituted fact checks might be dismissed as mere "Band-Aids" on a gaping wound. It's true, they won't drain the internet cesspool of trolls, liars, and hyper-partisan political screechers.

But Twitter has also painted itself into a corner by fact-checking Trump, who regularly lies and misrepresents too many times to count.

Any unhinged Trump tweet that goes un-fact-checked could be seen as a de facto Twitter-authorized truism. And any un-fact-checked misinformation from a Democratic politician could be seen as political bias.

And round and round we go, right back where we started, with no one satisfied, and still more "action" demanded of social media companies to determine the levels of truthiness.

Political campaigns are filled with lies. Government figures and the opposition both spread misleading propaganda designed to inflame their bases. News outlets often mask ideological biases in the form of straight news.

Twitter and Facebook's small measures at fact-checking will not make the internet a more honest place, and they invite reasonable accusations of partisanship.

Yet, they're still a better option than empowering (or demanding they empower themselves) extraordinarily rich, profit-driven business people as the gatekeepers for political speech.

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