For the first decade or so of his career, which also happened to be the first decade or so of his adult life, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and C.E.O. of Facebook, was able to move fast and break things—the news industry, for example—without being held to account for what he’d broken. He insisted repeatedly that Facebook was a platform, not a publisher. A publisher, after all, could be expected to make factual, qualitative, even moral distinctions; a publisher would have to stand behind what it published; a publisher might be responsible, reputationally or even legally, for what its content was doing to society. But a platform, at least according to the metaphor, was nothing but pure, empty space.
The metaphor doesn’t bear out, of course. Facebook has never been a neutral platform; it is a company whose business model depends on monitoring its users, modifying and manipulating their behavior, and selling their attention to the highest bidder. In 2008, Zuckerberg was interviewed by the journalist Kara Swisher. “I think you’re a media company,” she said.
“We’re definitely a technology company,” Zuckerberg said, laughing awkwardly.
“You’re building an audience and selling that audience,” Swisher continued.
“No, I mean, I think we’re building a lot of products in different ways that people can share information,” Zuckerberg said. He had just turned twenty-four—earlier in the interview, Swisher had apologized for referring to him as “the toddler C.E.O.”—but he had already mastered the C-suite art of speaking without conveying too much specific meaning, so as to avoid committing himself to policies that might hamper his company’s future growth.
I recently wrote a book, “Antisocial,” that shows how Zuckerberg and his fellow-founders came to build a new attentional economy, and how their techno-utopian ideology brought us to our current moment. At the core of this ideology—by turns naïve, blithely rapacious, and hubristic—was the technologists’ determination to avoid being perceived as gatekeepers. It’s now clear that they were gatekeepers—what else to call people whose algorithms influenced what billions of people saw, heard, and knew about the world?—and yet they were surprisingly adept at denying this fact. Some of them, at least in some circles, are still getting away with it.
Last month, Facebook announced a new policy regarding political ads. The policy is that politicians can say more or less whatever they want. “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression,” Katie Harbath, the company’s policy director for global elections and a former employee of Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 Presidential campaign, wrote. Last week, testifying before Congress, Zuckerberg said, “Our policy is that we do not fact-check politicians’ speech. And the reason for that is that we believe that in a democracy it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying.”
This rhetoric sounds nice—“free expression” and “in a democracy” are the phrasal equivalents of American-flag lapel pins—but it doesn’t amount to much. It’s one thing for Zuckerberg to build the world’s biggest microphone and then choose to rent that microphone to liars, authoritarians, professional propagandists, or anyone else who can afford to pay market rate. It’s another, more galling thing for him to claim that he is doing so for everyone’s benefit. And yet many of the members of Congress at last week’s hearing—the Republican ones, to be precise—seemed to take Zuckerberg’s rationale at face value. “I do want to commend you,” Andy Barr, a G.O.P. congressman from Kentucky, said. “I don’t want you to be bullied by politicians to relinquish our treasured free speech under the First Amendment.” Free speech is treasured indeed. It is also, in a discussion about Facebook’s policies, a canard: the First Amendment restricts government, not private companies. Bill Posey, a Republican from Florida, also encouraged Facebook to resist any temptation “to censor its users’ speech.” He was particularly concerned about one form of censorship: “I was disappointed that Facebook would consider restricting free-speech rights to communicate the risks associated with vaccinations.”
Amazon doesn’t sell cigarettes. Whole Foods doesn’t sell cigarettes. One could argue that this is a Maoist form of overreach, a repudiation of the system of free enterprise, a brazen attempt to enact central planning on a terrifying scale. One could argue that a single person—Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, a gatekeeper among gatekeepers—should not be in a position to decide what average American citizens can or can’t do with their bodies. One could argue that the inalienable rights of smokers, or of tobacco companies, are being violated. But nobody makes these arguments. It seems perfectly natural that Bezos chooses not to sell tobacco. It’s possible that this reflects his principled belief that some things are not worth profiting from, that even world-conquering companies can make moral distinctions when the stakes are clear enough. More likely, it’s a straightforward cost-benefit decision. In any case, it has little to do with gauzy abstractions about freedom.
The Times recently published a letter, initially posted on Facebook’s internal message board and signed by more than two hundred and fifty of the company’s employees, decrying the new ad policy. “Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing,” the letter read, followed by six specific suggestions as to how the policy could be improved, “short of eliminating political ads altogether.” If Zuckerberg were to implement his employee’s suggestions, the First Amendment would not suffer. No government agents would be dispatched to seize the servers of anti-vax bloggers. No dissembling politicians would be arrested for their lies. Facebook’s decision to change its policy would be a business decision, just as continuing to profit from disinformation is a business decision.
Last week, Facebook announced that it would launch an official news tab: a dedicated space within Facebook, curated by professional journalists, where users can find high-quality news from trusted sources. This was a long overdue recognition that Facebook is a publisher, not a platform. “What took you so long?” Robert Thomson, the C.E.O. of News Corp, asked Zuckerberg during an onstage event. (The New Yorker is one of five publications at Condé Nast that will participate in Facebook’s news tab.) The announcement of the news tab was designed to make journalists happy, and perhaps to garner Facebook a rare spate of good press. But it was quickly overshadowed by the revelation that one of the “trusted sources” would be Breitbart News. Again, Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives retreated to nebulous rhetoric about free speech and political neutrality. But, again, the decision to include Breitbart in the news tab was a business decision. Critics of this decision did not call for Breitbart to be stripped of its First Amendment right to publish without government interference. For the most part, the critics did not object to Breitbart’s inclusion in Facebook’s news tab on political grounds. The most salient objection was that a list of trusted news sources should not include Breitbart because Breitbart is not a trustworthy news source.
On Wednesday, on an earnings call, Zuckerberg spoke at length about why “I believe strongly” in “defending free expression.” “We face a lot of criticism from both progressives and conservatives,” he said. “Frankly, if our goal were trying to make either side happy, then we’re not doing a very good job.” This is classic C-suite self-justification. But Zuckerberg seems more anxious to assuage the right than the left, at least for now. According to a recent Politico story, Zuckerberg has dined privately with many prominent conservatives—Lindsey Graham, Tucker Carlson, and so on—“to talk about issues like free speech and discuss partnerships.” One of these conservatives was Ben Shapiro, the editor of a right-wing tabloid called the Daily Wire, who has recently emerged as a staunch defender of Facebook’s policies. On Monday, the progressive journalist Judd Legum published an article demonstrating that the Daily Wire uses a “secret network of Facebook pages” that coördinate to generate astonishing amounts of traffic, in violation of Facebook’s rules. A spokesperson for Facebook responded to the story by saying that the company was aware of the Daily Wire’s practices but would do nothing to curtail them. (The Daily Wire did not respond to Legum’s request for comment. Later, Oliver Darcy, a CNN reporter, did receive a comment from the Daily Wire’s chief operating officer, Jeremy Boreing: “When a platform alerts us to an infraction, we address it.”) Legum’s story was published in his newsletter, which is called Popular Information. This is an allusion to James Madison: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Madison was prescient, but even he could not have imagined how farcical and/or tragic the American informational landscape could become.
On Wednesday, Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, announced, via tweet thread, that his company would no longer accept political advertising. People, including politicians, will still be allowed to tweet about politics, of course, but their political messages will no longer be amplified by money. (“Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing,” the letter from Facebook employees read.) Dorsey’s thread was clearly aimed at Zuckerberg—Kara Swisher, in the Times, called it “the best subtweet ever”—and it ended with a finger-wag. “Paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle,” Dorsey tweeted. “It’s worth stepping back in order to address.” Twitter represents a tiny fraction of the global advertising market, and the company’s new policy won’t fix everything that needs fixing. But, as far as mottos go, “stepping back in order to address” is more Madisonian than “move fast and break things.”
