By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, May 13, 2019
Chris Hughes, a former Facebook executive, took to the New York Times to argue for breaking up
his former company. Some of the arguments were good. Namely, that Facebook uses
its near-monopolistic position in a way that is anti-competitive and hampers
progress and user accountability. One of the most novel arguments was that
Facebook employees themselves don’t even understand their company’s algorithms
for displaying content to Facebook users. And he had some good observations
about how regulators might be able to help on privacy issues.
Hughes also made some observations that were useful, but
he couldn’t see the full import of them. For instance, he pointed out that Mark
Zuckerburg desires more regulation from Washington, more guidance on what he
should and shouldn’t allow. But of course this greater level of regulation
would have the perverse effect of ensuring Facebook’s dominance; Zuckerburg’s
company can afford the lawyers and the compliance costs that go with them.
Further, it would shift the burden of governing speech on the platform away
from him and toward Washington. He would continue to see his wealth grow, but
responsibility for his product would be outsourced to the public.
But the most frustrating part of Hughes’s argument was
that, at the beginning and end, his biggest concern for worry was not to see
the 2016 election cycle repeated. This has been a major concern both in and
outside Facebook, and historian Niall Ferguson was the first to sense how much
pressure would come down on Silicon Valley not to be used by conservatives
again.
Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others in
Silicon Valley simply do not understand what they have built. In some ways it
is hard to blame them. They were kids. And imagining the political impact of
gargantuan social-media enterprises is difficult for adults. But adults with
the right education could have given them some clues.
Traditional media such as books and an ecosystem of
newspapers are an asset of highly developed institutions, with gatekeepers and
embodied forms of judgment. They are also the vehicle by which one class of
professionals tries to lead and form public opinion. Mass broadcast media,
including radio and TV, were tools that lent themselves toward conformism, as
dictators and advertising executives came to understand quickly. Social media,
lacking these institutionalized judgments, was always bound to become a
rallying point for those resisting the professional classes. The whole point
was to build “Web 2.0” platforms in which users generated content for each
other. And so social media in fact encourage opinions that run contrary to the
mainstream to become socially visible faster. If you were being provocative,
you might say that social media create a plane of popular visibility, allowing
the previously blindfolded passengers in democracy to exchange grave looks and
nods toward the “Let’s roll” attitude in a Flight 93 situation. In short,
social media are a vast new territory for the practice of democratic
deliberation, which is exactly why to proper liberals they look like a roiling
and endless food fight.
Even as it is the vehicle that allows populist opinion to
form more quickly, Facebook is not making people more conservative and
nationalist. Instead it is allowing the professional class to see, notice, and
quantify conservatives and nationalists having discussions and converging in
their opinions at a faster rate. And so the anger and blame that is heaped on
Facebook for “enabling” conservative and nationalist political victories
consists of little else than anger and fear of the voters who happen to use
Facebook.
It is impossible not to notice that the controversial
privacy-harming techniques and big-data approach used by the Obama 2012
campaign was praised by opinion leaders. But when the same techniques were used
on a much smaller scale for Brexit and Donald Trump, they were seen as
sinister. And the latter was almost always bound to happen. The largest
social-media companies are were always going to attract a proportionally older
and therefore more conservative user base. To blame Facebook for “helping”
conservatives is little different from blaming a window for revealing the
roiling tide on the other side.
I predicted last year that the center-left governments
across the West and the professional classes attached to them would not bother
too much about the role of Silicon Valley companies in fomenting revolution,
chaos, or even repression in the third world, so long as these companies
promised to act as protectors against the practice of democracy by conservative
and nationalist critics of the liberal political consensus. Because Hughes is
no longer invested in the stock price of Facebook, he is free to argue for this
protection effort even at the expense of Facebook’s future value. It helps him
regain the status he lost in his ownership of The New Republic and the embarrassing political campaigns of his
spouse.
But since I made the prediction that Silicon Valley would
take the deals on offer — a promise to program users to become more woke, in
exchange for a limitless profits license — my thinking has changed slightly.
Social media’s value — the Internet’s commercial value — is intensely tied up
in its ability to provide a space for critique and open resentment of our
would-be mandarin class. The proposition — to act as an ideological enforcer
and “opinion leader,” to turn social media into a weaponized and more insidious
form of mass-media propaganda — will be a fatal bargain for these companies,
and for their patron governments.
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