By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, insists that his
company will not act as a proxy censor for the world’s governments — that it
has neither the capacity nor the legitimacy to do so, and that attempting it
would constitute an improper exercise of corporate power. “I don’t think it’s
right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy,”
he writes. With exceptions, of course: “We don’t allow content if there’s a
risk of real-world harm, and we don’t allow voter suppression.”
Zuckerberg’s attempt to position Facebook as a kind of
nightwatchman looking after community safety rather than a censor cannot bear
very much scrutiny. Private companies of course exercise editorial judgment of
politicians and the news in our democracy constantly — the New York Times, for example, is a private company, and it will not
simply repeat every claim it receives or print every political ad somebody
wants to pay for. ABC, HarperCollins, National
Review — everybody makes decisions about content, and those decisions are
made based on a combination of ethical, intellectual, and commercial considerations.
There’s no avoiding it.
Facebook already has certain editorial functions pressed
upon it by governments in the United States and abroad, and those are
substantial. The free-speech culture and legal regime of the United States is
unusual to the point of being effectively unique, and even the liberal
democracies of Western Europe are much more aggressive in matters of explicit
state censorship. The anything-goes rhetoric of the early days of the Internet
is almost entirely a thing of the past: Facebook could, in theory, be a platform
permitting a very wide range of communication, intervening only in
extraordinary circumstances, e.g. the publication of child pornography or
schematics for nuclear weapons. But governments, especially European
governments, will not allow it to be that. Neither will the hysterically
conformist culture of these United States circa 2019. “Information wants to be
free,” the techno-utopians used to say. But very few people actually want
information to be free. And Facebook’s management is no less shaped by the
homogeneity-enforcing culture of tribal imperative than is any other similar
company’s. This is incomprehensible to Zuckerberg and other men of his kind for
the same reason fish don’t know what water is.
Facebook is not exactly a publisher and not exactly not a
publisher; Zuckerberg and his team wish to avoid admitting that what Facebook
does is at least partly editorial in character, because such a confession would
bring with it responsibilities (and, possibly, liabilities) that Facebook does
not wish to take on. The rhetoric of “safety” must be understood as an
intellectual dodge and nothing more, a way for Facebook to enjoy the desultory
exercise of editorial powers without taking on more editorial responsibilities.
The enforcement of such nonempirical standards as taste and judgment implies a
kind of cultural and aesthetic hierarchy that Silicon Valley’s ruling class
embraces ruthlessly but will never admit to countenancing. Hence the tech
moguls’ confused attitude toward everything from the enjoyment of vast wealth
to the urgent question of free speech. In both cases, tech executives (who, for
such powerful men, are remarkably easy to bully) are working backward from
their own social comfort to corporate policy.
That much is obvious from Facebook’s own peculiar
selectivity. The figures that Facebook and other social-media companies have
blacklisted include most prominently gadflies and media entrepreneurs such as
Milo Yiannapoulos and Laura Loomer — who are straight-up dopes, rodeo clowns
rather than stormtroopers. These people are not excluded from Facebook because
they present a danger to anything
other than good taste; they are excluded because they are unpopular — or, to be
more precise, because they are unfashionable.
Hosting Milo Yiannapoulos on your site is an offense against fashion and the
community of shared taste — he’s a Nickelback T-shirt worn unironically. His
function is purely semiotic, and objections to him are hardly rooted in
scrupulosity about matters of fact or logic. Why do you think the Washington Post prints paeans to science
and horoscopes in the same newspaper? The animating energy in these matters
comes from social allegiance, not from the careful application of reason.
For comparison, consider the parallel cases of Louis
Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. Facebook was finally shamed into banishing Farrakhan
on tit-for-tat grounds, inasmuch as his racism and anti-Semitism are more plain
and more consequential than whatever prejudices might be reasonably attributed
to, say, Alex Jones or Gavin McInnis, crackpots and bigots though they may be.
(In spite of his insistence to the contrary, I am not entirely convinced that
McInnes’s shtick is not in fact a kind of Andy Kaufman performance gone rancid,
though I do not doubt the sincerity of his anti-feminism or wish to minimize
his advocacy of political violence.) The Reverend Sharpton’s views are only
slightly if at all less odious than Farrakhan’s, and he is one of the handful
of political communicators in American public life whose rhetorical excesses
have been very closely linked to murderous political violence, his racist and
anti-Semitic provocations having preceded the Crown Heights riots and the
massacre at Freddy’s Fashion Mart. But he remains welcome in polite society,
and it is impossible to imagine Facebook’s excluding an MSNBC host.
(I should note here that I have appeared alongside both
McInnes and Sharpton on television panels and that I am one of those nefarious
right-wingers Zuckerberg has consulted to the consternation of so-called
liberals who take a cooties-dominated view of conversation.)
Alex Jones believes, or pretends to believe, absurd
things. He traffics in lies, and that trafficking sometimes has real-world
consequences. But, again, consider parallel cases: Both Lena Dunham and Rolling Stone magazine have published
politically motivated rape hoaxes, and those fabrications had real-world
consequences, too. Is it possible to imagine Lena Dunham or Rolling Stone being given the Alex Jones
treatment by Facebook? To be designated a danger?
To ask the question is to answer it. The matter at hand is not a question of
safety but relates rather to the totemic and symbolic nature of what it is that
is really happening on Facebook and Twitter. Lena Dunham’s fabrications do not
push the buttons of nice California progressives in the same way Alex Jones’s
do, and the reasons for that have nothing at all to do with safety.
I don’t make these comparisons to point out hypocrisy.
(An obsession with petty hypocrisy indicates an adolescent mind.) I mean
instead to draw attention to something else entirely: that Zuckerberg and his
colleagues do not actually understand their own product or the role Facebook
and other social-media platforms actually play in political life in the United
States — beginning with the fact that our political discourse is only
incidentally about politics.
On the front end, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
are trivial as technological achievements. The interesting part of Facebook
largely remains invisible to its users. But crude as the social-media
interfaces may be, they intersect in very powerful ways with cultural currents
that are experienced at the moment as extraordinarily urgent, though the
long-term durability of that urgency is far from certain. (Zuckerberg et al.
surely have learned from the examples of their commercial antecedents that it
is possible for a product to be simultaneously addictive and boring, as all
addictions ultimately are, and that the market position of such products must
be perilous.) The ironies are titanic: By offering to connect everyone to
everyone, social media has created a new kind of loneliness; by offering a
democratized platform for speech it reveals how little of interest most of the demos has to say. The genius of Facebook
and Twitter is in exploiting natural and nearly universal human anxieties about
social status by quantifying that status and publicizing it, thereby fusing it
with the online identities of social-media users. It is for this reason that
deplatforming campaigns (including the much-discussed one against me) are
almost always described in terms of status: The objection to the New York Times hiring a Bret Stephens or
a Bari Weiss is that those voices are elevated
by association with a prestigious institution, and, because status is a
zero-sum game, those who see themselves as rivals (enemies, really) of those
voices must thereby feel diminished.
Facebook, properly understood, is a kind of basketball
court or baseball diamond, a field of play in the game of status-seeking.
People do not go to Facebook or Twitter to learn about the world or to engage
in productive and intelligent conversation with people who see the it
differently. In fact, as I show at some length in The Smallest Minority, my book on the poisoning of public discourse
by social media, the very structure of the status competition precludes the
emergence of fruitful discourse on social media because the respect necessary
to respectful exchange is itself status-conferring and hence of negative value
in the game at hand. That is why sneering, intellectual dishonesty, lies,
insults, ad hominem, etc. are the ruling modes of communication on social
media. They are status-lowering, and status-lowering strategies work pretty
well in a status game. (Ask President Donald J. Trump about that, if it is not
obvious enough to you.)
My own brief interactions with Zuckerberg left me with the
impression that he is both intelligent and earnest but also both politically
and culturally naïve. He faces great difficulty as he and his team attempt to
negotiate the political realities of Washington — where Democrats blame
Facebook for the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 as a means of
psychologically absolving themselves of their own culpable incompetence — and
the even more challenging environments in Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, Beijing,
etc. Part of that difficulty is rooted in a sentimental inability to admit what
Facebook has become, which is not what Zuckerberg et al. had intended it to be.
At least as far as it touches political discourse, Facebook is not a means of
connecting people and enabling relationships. It is a vast online roleplaying
game played by mediocrities who do not even quite understand what it is they
are so angry about and why their daily acts of social-media theater fail to
provide the catharsis they desire, leaving them instead only more agitated,
anxious, and despairing.
Which is to say, fixing what’s wrong with Facebook must
begin with conceptual reform and a new spirit of intellectual forthrightness
that the company’s executives so far have not managed to muster, however good
their intentions. A few policy tweaks, no matter how clever, are not going to
get it done. Facebook’s short-term problem may be Elizabeth Warren, but
Facebook’s long-term problem is Facebook.
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