By Rich Lowry
Friday, July 10, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg clearly hasn’t gotten the memo.
The founder of Facebook persists in defending free
expression, even though free speech has fallen decidedly out of fashion.
His reward for adhering to what once would have been a
commonsensical, if not banal, view of the value of the free exchange of ideas
is to get vilified for running a hate-speech machine and to get boycotted by
major American companies.
In a speech at Georgetown University last fall,
Zuckerberg stated that it’s important “we hold each other’s right to express
our views and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we
want.” He noted that free speech has been central to the worldwide fight for
democracy. He hailed Supreme Court jurisprudence that has strengthened First
Amendment protections.
Once upon a time, the reaction would have been, “We’re
glad that a titan of Silicon Valley has absorbed core American values and is
attempting, however imperfectly, to apply them to his company.”
In 2020, the reaction instead has been, “Let’s get the
bastard.”
Internet companies are always going to be engaged in the
fraught business of drawing the line between what’s permissible or not, but the
current Facebook controversy is more consequential than that. The company is
the target of left-wing activists who, with the ready assent of corporate
America, have been able to force a wave of cancellations around the culture and
now seek to bend a social media behemoth to their will.
(Full disclosure: My publication, National Review,
is part of the Facebook News tab.)
The Georgetown speech led the activists to conclude, as a
report in Politico magazine put it, “the CEO believed, deep in his
bones, that his commitment to free expression . . . was right.”
And, again, this was a bad thing.
One flashpoint was Zuckerberg’s reference to the importance
of the First Amendment to the cause of civil rights over the years. This was a
true and unassailable point, but one that activists considered offensive coming
from Zuckerberg — as if he’s Bull Connor rather than a Silicon Valley executive
with reliably progressive views on social issues.
Another was Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook
wouldn’t censor politicians or fact-check political ads, taking an
appropriately modest view of the company’s ability to fairly police political
content involving wildly divergent worldviews and values.
The final straw was Facebook’s holding out against
pressure in late May to act against President Donald Trump’s infamous post
saying, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This was a stupid,
inflammatory, and unpresidential thing to say, but it wasn’t an incitement to
violence. In keeping the post up, Facebook wanted people to draw their own
conclusions; it wasn’t an endorsement, but an invitation to debate — exactly
what the activists want to curtail.
They have pursued two lines of attack. One has been to
get companies to stop advertising with Facebook, and many have been only too
eager to lend their names to a trendy campaign of intimidation.
The other has been to associate Facebook with the words
“racism” and “hate” as much as possible to create the slanderous misimpression
that Facebook makes its money off the posts of neo-Nazis rather than ordinary
people who find it, for better or worse, a useful platform.
I’ve been harshly critical of Facebook over the years,
but on this it is right. The public is served by a robust debate online, where
people can decide for themselves the merits of what Trump or Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says.
The stakes are especially high in this fight. Facebook is an institution too big to cancel. Despite all the corporate names associated with it, the advertising boycott is a mere flesh wound in terms of the company’s revenue. If Zuckerberg can nonetheless be browbeaten out of his well-considered support for a free-speech-centric approach to his platform, it will be a particularly portentous omen in a period of our national life full of them.
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