| It’s worth pointing out that Facebook did not, in fact, stop the spread of the Post story on its platform. As Popular Information’s Judd Legum reported, the story had, by midmorning, been shared 321,834 times, with 1.2 million engagements. “The reality is that the article has already gotten more distribution than nearly every link posted to Facebook—that’s the opposite of censorship,” wrote Legum, who added, “The point here is that there is often a significant delta between what Facebook says it is doing and what they actually do.”
The cynical read of Facebook’s declared interest in throttling this one story, even as its platform continues to be a river of misinformation (notably of conservative ratfuckery), is that it sees which way the election is trending and wants to build some favor-trading inroads with a potential Biden administration. I think this interpretation also happens to be the soundest. The one constant in Facebook’s political calculations over the years is the goal of protecting its buck-raking empire—which is founded on extracting your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder—from would-be digital trust-busters. Mark Zuckerberg cozied up to Trump for a reason, and it wasn’t grooming tips.
Liberals may take some momentary satisfaction to see the Post story subjected to scrutiny in Silicon Valley, but Facebook is not your friend. As Matt Stoller wrote a year ago, Facebook is among the tech giants that have formed an infernal media monopoly, without the safeguards that media companies traditionally install to maintain the public trust. “There are a series of ethical structures designed to inhibit excessive control of advertisers in media industries,” Stoller writes. “But such ethical debates have yet to occur around information utilities. Consequently, the manifestation of the distorting effect of advertising—addiction, manipulation, fraud, tearing of a collective social fabric—has been met with little cultural immunity, policy response or institutional defenses.”
I’ve written about how the media industry bears some responsibility for this sorry state, but Stoller is absolutely correct that “technology is shaped by law,” and over the years the law has bent our information industry into its current anti-democratic, monopolized state. Fixing the problem will require energetic lawmaking and the will to blow up Big Tech. Facebook’s pretend foray into curbing misinformation is an attempt to distract us from this path. Zuckerberg wants us to think that he and his fellow titans can police themselves. But we are already living amid the wreckage of this failed promise.
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor | 