An Unworthy Retreat from Truth
Terry H. Schwadon
Jan.8, 2024
No one’s going to put Facebook/Meta Mark Zuckerberg’s image on any reissued Profiles in Courage publication.
In a singular act that will advance the cause of public misinformation and disinformation exponentially, Zuckerberg has tossed any intention of doing fact-checking on his popular and profitable social media outlets. It’s a stance bound to make him more acceptable to Donald Trump and MAGA and will help exactly no one trying to sort the verifiable from propaganda.
Zuckerberg could have said that the job has gotten too hard amid the torrents of made-up partisan political commentary because the volume of crap has grown out of control. He could have said his team, and his algorithms can’t keep up with organized efforts to use social media as propaganda channels. He could have said the standards for judgment keep changing.
Instead, he took a partisan line — Trump’s partisan line — and said conservatives were being unfairly challenged in truth wars. Zuckerberg chose the very week of a Jan. 6 revisit in which Republican leaders continue to argue that the Capitol riot was largely a tourist event, that any violence was created by the FBI or Antifa, and that in his rewrite of political history, Trump is about to pardon hundreds arrested in breaking into the Capitol.
Instead, Zuckerberg’s company will allow users to write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts, adding context or debunking key claims. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” all but bowing before Trump, who complains that fact-checking impairs free speech. He also appointed two Trump loyalists to his board and wrote a million-dollar check to Trump’s inauguration and presidential library fund.
Bravado with a Shield
Facebook, Instagram, X and the rest of social media flourish because they are protected as publishers under a special regulation indemnifying them from lawsuits, often referred to Section 230 of the Communication Act. It suggests that social media operate as the phone companies do, delivering a message without regard to its content.
But as lots of Congressional hearings and zillions of public comments have outlined, the power of these social media company to push content, to encourage engagement, to electronically pick fights among those who would rise to social media conflict says there is a bias towards confrontation.
As publishers of newspapers, magazines, television stations and books can attest, the obligations of owning information distribution channels also come with responsibilities to help discern truth from fiction, to avoid libel and slander, to accept a journalistic role as useful arbiter among competing arguments by providing context. Doing so is expensive and hard work, traits that seem at odds with Meta’s profit-eager ways towards rigor and verification.
Over years and years now, Facebook and others have faced demands to counter the takeover of their distribution networks through standard setting and with determined efforts to label and sometimes block posts that violate those standards. Difficult as it may seem to do, social media publishers readily accept that role when the issue involves child pornography, for example, but have been more than hesitant about even outright lies or identified disinformation campaigns by organized groups or even nation-states that undertake manipulation of, say, American elections with untrue information.
The political parties in Washington have warred at times about how much advice and counsel might come from the FBI and Justice about what constitutes disinformation.
Facebook also faces anti-trust actions, so better relations with an incoming administration might just be to its advantage.
Zuckerberg’s announcement is one that simply gives in and will stand off from any responsibility.
If I were in Congress, I’d be proposing revocation of that Section 230 right about now.
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