So... Facebook.
Are you on it?
Yeah, me too.
And it’s been getting plenty of bad news of late.
As of this article’s posting, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been getting a lot of heat. First from the “60 Minutes” interview and later public testimony in Congress from one of its former employees accusing Facebook of endangering children and teens and stirring up hate and division for adults. And then Facebook and all of its various services were down for six hours, depriving users of their urges to post food pictures and to see what other people are posting. And now we have the calls to regulate all social media. To do away with Section 230 of the Telecom Act, and to control the content for our supposed sakes.
First of all, we’ve been here before.
It wasn’t that long ago when a certain orange-skinned narcissist and his legions of fascist cult followers and enablers were whining and crying about a non-existent “conservative bias” and wanted Section 230 done away with so they can continue to spread lies and to silence their critics. They also tried to ban and shut down TikTok for the same reasons and because they were, at the time, owned by the Chinese.
Before that, it was about anything supporting Muslims. And before that it was about “indecency”.
This commentator has been in support of online freedoms since day one. This commentator was part of the lawsuit that became the Supreme Court decision giving the Internet the greatest possible guarantee of First Amendment protections under the United States Constitution. And while the “indecency” part has been done away with and the protections under Section 230 have been affirmed and reaffirmed in the courts, the effort to eliminate Section 230 continue. Those who continue to do so should be warned that people like yours truly will once again rise up and oppose you, like we did twenty-five years ago.
Freedom of speech does mean the right to be wrong and to voice your right to be wrong. Not when it comes to slander or libel or to cause a riot, but it does allow the flat-earth people to continue to believe that the world is a plate instead of a ball. It allows people to believe that we never went to the moon and that what we saw on TV was done on a film soundstage. It allows people to continue to believe that the events of 9/11 were an “inside job” no matter how absurd that may be. It allows a certain faction of people to believe that the 2020 election was “stolen”, just like another faction of people believed that the 2000 and 2004 elections were “stolen”.
What it does not allow, though, is for those folks to start a riot, or to plan a terrorist act, or to orchestrate an insurrection, or to cause violence against others. The old libertarian saying of “the right of my fist ends just before it hits your nose” is true here as in anyplace else. It does not allow for slander or libel or fraud. Call a victim of a school shooting a “crisis actor” and you will rightly get sued. Just ask Alex Jones.
Section 230 protects the providers from retaliation from the conduct of the users. So imagine if that certain narcissist and his fascist cronies and enablers managed to get rid of that section and you said something bad about said narcissist. They’d not only be able to go after you, but also go after the forum that you said the “bad thing” on. And they’d rather go after that forum than you because they have more money. You say “that could never happen...” and yet they tried for almost four years to get rid of Section 230 so they could do just that.
That’s not to say that Facebook and the rest of the tech world shouldn’t get away with what they’ve done. I’m just saying you cannot and should not do it by getting rid of the one thing that protects you and me and everyone else from the likes of the narcissist and his fascist faction.
The problem isn’t with the providers of speech. It’s about how they steer content.
I’ve said this before but it is worth repeating... Facebook is *not* a social media provider. Its purpose is *not* to provide a platform for people. I know people think that’s what Facebook is, but it really isn’t!
Facebook is an information brokerage company that uses social media as a means to collect information about people and then markets said information to companies for a fee. Sometimes it is for advertisement, but not always. They allow you to post comments and share pictures and videos and to share other posts because that tells them more about you and what you like or dislike.
That’s why Facebook makes so much money for something that we use “for free”. That’s because we are not Facebook’s customers. We are their product. We are the source of the data that they collect and then market to others, who pay them for it. They are the customers. Not us.
To that end, Facebook and its subsidiaries like Instagram have a vested interest in keeping you addicted to them and to keep you giving them that data through your interaction. They give you ads so you can react to them, which allows them to get paid from the people providing the ads. They channel information to you that they know you will be drawn to, for good... like cat videos... or for bad... like lies about COVID.
Let’s get brutally honest here folks... this really is *not* a free speech issue. This is a matter of personal information and marketing of that information for the provider’s financial gain. In other words, it’s a matter of commercial trade. It’s business. And it is the business model that needs to be stopped.
The problem at hand is with the algorithms that Facebook and the others use, not the content itself. They steer content, control the content, to keep you hooked to them. Without it, they’d be nothing more than another message board like the old Prodigy, CompuServe, or America Online services. Remember them? To that end, they violate the spirit of Section 230, because they are clearly *not* neutral providers. As long as they steer specific content for any reason, they are not neutral.
This is different from other Big Tech companies like Google, whose Blogger service provides all sorts of user content, but doesn’t shove that content in your face unless you search for it. Same with Twitter. The content they give is the content you consciously subscribe to.
TikTok is another company that has a Facebook problem, because their “For You” section is also steered content based on algorithms. In addition, you may have heard of their “challenges” which encourage dangerous, violent, or even outright criminal behavior. People have been hospitalized and arrested for them. What is not known is who is coming up with these “challenges”. If the creators of these dangerous and illegal “challenges” were to be made public, then we could at least bring them to account. The fact that we don’t know who they are, though, means that TikTok is complicit with their activity.
It also doesn’t help that the admins of TikTok have a piss-poor method of dealing with complaints. Yeah, they can take down and ban videos a woman for being fully clothed and call that “indecent”, but at the same time they won’t give out who has been posting “challenges” for people to swallow laundry pods, destroy property, or outright assault people.
This commentator will support the fight to keep TikTok in operation as a content provider, but not for their haphazard and reckless disregard for the encouragement of dangerous and criminal activity while censoring the otherwise innocuous content of others simply because some self-righteous self-entitled Karen or Ken decide they don’t like it.
I also know it’s hard to get ourselves out of some of these social media services like Facebook and Instagram. And not just because of the addictiveness of their algorithms. We may have connections through them, both personal and business. We have friends, family, groups, acquaintances, even celebrities that we keep in touch with through them. There is information that we may not get anyplace else. Many readers of this very online column are reading this article because of a link that they saw on Facebook or Twitter. It’s hard to let all that go, and yet, like any other dangerous addiction, we may need to do just that. But that’s something that we, as individuals, need to do. Not some act of Congress.
Many in Big Tech do need to clean up their act. I’ve been saying this for a while now. But it needs to be done right, and not through some wide-slicing censorship act or regulation that really doesn’t fix the problem, but only makes it easier for the next batch of thugs and fascists to silence us.
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