Seeing through Zuckerberg’s Talk at Georgetown University
Mark Zuckerberg spoke in defense of Facebook this week at Georgetown, and then later in the week faced pushback from Democrats in Congress. The complaint is that by maintaining a hands-off policy with respect to political misinformation, Facebook is setting up our democracy to be hijacked once again by those who would rather confuse than inform. His defense is to wrap himself and Facebook in the mantle of liberty and trumpet the virtues of free speech. It’s natural to view Zuckerberg’s position as self-serving. He certainly flailed under the questioning of Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Waters and Porter. (It’s also true that his obvious disorientation under scrutiny gives lie to idea that he had anything to do with writing the Georgetown speech. It resembled nothing so much as a student talking to a professor about a paper he’s just plagiarized.) But set these things aside. What about the argument itself? It’s worth a close look, because as is usually the case, the situation isn’t simple. A lot of what Zuckerberg says is right, and the fact that it’s him saying it—self-serving though he is—doesn’t make him any less right. The problem is that it’s difficult to get clear on what he’s really arguing for. It’s not at all obvious that what he’s right about—namely the value of free speech—supports what he’s really defending—namely, Facebook’s permissive approach to political information and advertising.
Here’s the gist of Zuckerberg’s argument. (I encourage you to read the whole thing here.)
Free, uncensored speech is a necessity in a democratic society, and Facebook is a platform for that speech. But, Zuckerberg admits, lines have to be drawn. It’s permissible, even desirable, to restrict speech that “puts people in danger” as well as things like pornography which “would make people uncomfortable using our platforms.” It’s tough to draw the line. In general, he seems to think, it’s best that Facebook avoid regulating the speech on its platform. There is a need to protect ourselves from the sort of manipulation Russian hackers perpetrated in 2016, but this is best done by requiring user verification: they now “require you to provide a government ID and prove your location if you want to run political ads or run a large page.” While Facebook works to weed out viral hoaxes, they want to avoid trying to restrict misinformation in general, which might include satire or the unintentionally wrong views many of us hold. In the end, we should be careful, because Zuckerberg doesn’t “think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true.” Facebook allows speech by political figures, even when it is wrong, and doesn’t fact check political ads. “I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy,” Zuckerberg says. Again, there are difficult lines to be drawn. If they were to ban political ads, should they also ban ads on political issues? Zuckerberg seems to think we face a choice: we could constrain free expression on the internet, as it’s done in China, or we can have an internet that privileges open speech. Zuckerberg’s position is basically that Facebook has “two responsibilities: to remove content when it could cause real danger as effectively as we can, and to fight to uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible — and not allow the definition of what is considered dangerous to expand beyond what is absolutely necessary.”
It’s obviously hard to disagree with the general notion that people should be allowed to speak their mind, and that free speech is important to democracy. That’s the strategic brilliance of Zuckerberg’s speech. But what exactly is Zuckerberg arguing for? What is he arguing against? This matters. It’s one thing to say that people should be allowed to say and think what they want. It’s another to say that a company should accept money to promote content that is demonstrably false. The biggest problem with Zuckerberg’s argument is that he makes statements that are true, all things being equal, when applied to society as a whole, but that don’t obviously apply to the behavior of companies like Facebook. Facebook’s very business model is predicated upon doing things we would strenuously object to if they governed social discourse as a whole. Would we want democratic discourse to be governed by proprietary algorithms that bring certain voices to our attention and push others to the background? Would we want democratic discourse to be engineered to addict us to having that discourse in a particular place, for the benefit of a particular company? Would we want to have to verify our identity and location in order to speak our mind? Would we want a government to record and store everything we say, only to turn around and market that information to advertisers? These are all things that Facebook does, and if it’s ok for Facebook to do them, it’s because Facebook is a private business, not a government or a country. Zuckerberg and Facebook can’t have it both ways: if they embrace the arguments for open democratic discourse, they need to hold themselves to those standards across the board. You can’t be laissez faire while rigging the circulation of ideas behind the scenes.
It’s one of the ironies of Zuckerberg’s speech that he almost makes the case for turning Facebook into a public utility. His arguments are really only plausible if Facebook is such an essential platform for public discourse that restricting speech on the network would be tantamount to censoring free speech. But if it is such an essential platform, should it really be governed by a company that isn’t democratically representative, that doesn’t answer to the public or the government, and that is driven by a profit motive?
I don’t expect Facebook to be turned into a public utility anytime soon, and there would be some obvious drawbacks to doing so. Given that, can’t Zuckerberg make the argument that it should be as free as it can be within the limitations of being a company with a profit motive? That is, given Facebook is what it is, shouldn’t it avoid restricting speech?
The fact is, we do restrict certain speech in certain places, not because it risks physical harm but because it is a danger to our democratic institutions. You cannot stand by a voting booth and make a stump speech (or even brandish an advertisement) because doing so would threaten to corrupt the political process. There are numerous rules about political advertising that limit what can be done—they must include disclaimers, for example, indicating whether they are affiliated with a particular campaign. Regulations like this arise in part as a response to new forms of media and the particular threats they pose. We shouldn’t let our love of free speech blind us to the need to make sure our political processes can flourish, and that there are likely to be unique threats posed by new technologies that require considering new rules. I don’t pretend to know what all of those are, or what the appropriate steps are, but given the potential impact, does it not make sense to err on the side of protecting our political heritage while we find our footing?
Despite his repeated insistence that these problems are nuanced, Zuckerberg completely fails to recognize that the solutions can be as well. No one is suggesting that Facebook police Uncle Joe’s posts to make sure he’s got his facts straight—though it’s certainly not morally wrong or anti-democratic to erect a social network that tried to do so. (Wikipedia, it’s worth saying, has done pretty well holding user generated content to strict standards.) And while it’s true that there are some tricky distinctions to be drawn between lying political ads, ads with scientifically inaccurate information and ads about issues with controversial truths, that doesn’t mean those distinctions shouldn’t be drawn. There’s no clear way to draw a line between a kid who is too immature to use Facebook and one who can handle it, but Facebook manages to draw the line anyway, at the rather young age of 13.
Zuckerberg is right that Facebook needs to tread carefully here. It has become too influential in our political system for decisions to be made rashly. That’s some reason to believe that it has simply become too influential period. In the end, though, taken as a defense of Facebook, Zuckerberg’s paean to free speech is unconvincing. Facebook’s policies now as ever are justified more by keeping people on the network than by democratic ideals, and Zuckerberg—whose own shares in the company confer super-voting rights many times greater than the typical share—knows this perfectly well.