By David French
Friday, August 24, 2018
It seems like each week brings yet another example of
strange and amateurish Facebook censorship. Last Friday morning, the immensely
popular PragerU platform tweeted that Facebook had blocked access to its
videos. PragerU screen-capped the proof. By the evening, Facebook reported that
it had “mistakenly” removed the videos and was restoring access.
Then, yesterday, journalist and bestselling author Salena
Zito reported that Facebook seemed to be censoring a story she wrote for the New York Post detailing why many Trump
supporters won’t be shaken by the Paul Manafort conviction or the Michael Cohen
plea deal. Some of her readers reported that it was being marked as “spam.”
Others told her that Facebook was reporting that the article “did not follow”
its “Community Standards.”
Then, suddenly, the posts reappeared. In both instances
there has been no satisfactory explanation from Facebook for its censorship.
Let’s draw some distinctions. When Facebook wants to
systematically and intentionally censor, it can do so with ruthless efficiency.
Earlier this week I wrote about how it’s not only blocking access to the
website codeisfreespeech.com (which contains links to lawful gun designs), it’s
diligently preventing speech about the site. Moreover, there was no ambiguity
when it removed Alex Jones’s content from the site for “dehumanizing language.”
Moreover, it’s hard to argue that Facebook was trying to
get away with stealth censorship. How can you quietly block access to articles
and videos posted by people with access to other public platforms? These
actions reek of errors or incompetence, not systematic silencing. But to
believe that the censorship isn’t calculated isn’t necessarily consoling.
Instead, it helps expose the deeper problems of our social-media platforms. Our
progressive tech titans built corporations based on a number of false premises,
and now they have a tiger by the tail. They don’t know what to do, they’re
bumbling around, and there is collateral damage.
Let’s back up a moment. Much of the Internet has been
built by people who aspired to bring the world together. They wanted to “make
the world a better place” (to use the line hilariously and constantly satirized
on HBO’s Silicon Valley) by
connecting people, facilitating relationships, and putting the sum total of the
world’s knowledge at every person’s fingertips. I’m oversimplifying, of course,
but there was (and often still is) an infectious optimism — about people, about
the possibilities of technology — that lies at the foundation of virtually
every one of our modern tech goliaths.
Behind much of this idealism is certain understanding of
human nature — one that at the very least posits that connection will be good,
problems can be managed, and virtue will ultimately win.
But what if this understanding is fundamentally flawed?
What if the net effect of all this connection is that human flaws are magnified
perhaps even more than human virtues, problems can’t either be coded or managed
away, and whether good or evil ultimately wins is in constant doubt? What if
the result is a product that people feel they can’t do without (great for the
bottom line) but that also magnifies anger and division, leading to a constant
outcry from customers distressed by their experience with your product?
And then what if your product serves the whole nation,
but your colleagues and peers almost exclusively reflect the ideas and
worldview of a small slice of the progressive elite?
Well then, you’ve got a well-nigh unsolvable problem.
It’s going to be clear, soon enough, that algorithms and automation won’t solve
your problem. Smart people from all sides can game the system and spot its
biases, quickly. Complaint-based systems are going to create large-scale
problems with heckler’s vetoes, incentivizing bad-faith spam reporting or
bad-faith hate-speech claims. (Remember, your user base isn’t as virtuous as
you thought.)
Then, failing automation and punting your policing to
users, your top-down subjective, technocratic solutions — relying on mechanisms
such as, say, a “trust and safety council” or “hate speech” policies — will be
just as unsatisfactory. If you satisfy the internal constituencies and staff
your team with people who largely reflect the company’s core ethos, then you’ll
craft “hate speech” or “dehumanizing language” guidelines that target or
alienate an immense portion of your customer base (while leaving the hateful or
dehumanizing language of ideological allies intact). But make your technocrats
more ideologically diverse — more reflective of the nation you’re trying to
reach — and you’ll infuriate your workforce. Remember, we now live in an era
when it’s just an intolerable affront in some quarters to work alongside a
person who doesn’t share your worldview.
The ultimate result of all these flawed premises and all
the flawed solutions is exactly the world you see before you today — a world
dominated by progressive corporations that engage in a handful of explicit
crackdowns and a host of confused, ad hoc, and seemingly arbitrary “mistakes”
or unexplained actions that leave no one satisfied and make too many of their
users long for market alternatives.
They were wrong about human virtue. They were too
confident in their ability to manage the user experience of hundreds of
millions of people while keeping the platform open enough to create a version
of the marketplace of ideas. In short, they thought they could do better than
the First Amendment, and they failed. A series of choices loom, between a
miserable status quo, an alienating authoritarian future, and a more rational
but less progressive regime that strikes the same kinds of balances that have
benefited American culture for more than two centuries.
The fundamental viewpoint neutrality of classic First
Amendment doctrine is the right refuge for the titans of social media. But is
this a lesson they will ever choose to learn?
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