Apple, Google, Spotify, and Facebook recently took steps to remove much of the content posted by the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Many conservatives protested these actions including President Trump, who tweeted: “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”
As we get closer to the 2018 Midterm elections, the actions taken by social media companies to deal with fake news, bots, and the like will be closely scrutinized and for good reason. Social media usage has grown dramatically in recent years. A 2018 Pew Study reports that 69 percent of US adults now use some form of social media (excluding YouTube), constituting “a nearly fourteenfold increase” since 2006. Although this usage is still most heavily concentrated in the younger age groups, it is up across the board and now includes 37 percent of those over 65.
This would have little or no political relevance if these companies had not migrated into America’s political space. In addition to providing a forum for friends to exchange political opinions, social media entities like Facebook have become important news sources. Pew claims that online media now rival television as a source of news (50 percent TV to 43 percent online), dwarfing radio (25 percent) and newspapers (18 percent). Facebook is currently the dominant social media player both in terms of the number of US adults who view their site (66 percent) and who rely on it for getting the news (45 percent).
In the current polarized era, political prominence inevitably begets partisan controversy. Pew found that 70 percent of the public believes that social media companies censor political viewpoints. Not surprisingly, Republicans (62 percent) believe that these platforms favor liberals (despite the role that Facebook’s deal with Cambridge Analytica played in helping Trump win the 2016 election) whereas a majority of Democrats (54 percent) believe that social media are ideologically even-handed. Even so, fewer Republicans than Democrats (44 as opposed to 57 percent) favor more regulation of social media. Presidential mau-mauing apparently suffices for many.
There is no reason to believe that these trends will reverse themselves in the near future. Over 70 percent of Pew’s respondents believe that social media’s impact on them personally and the country as a whole has been net positive. And given that there is not much prospect of meaningful regulation coming out of the Republican Congress and the completely dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, private companies like Facebook are essentially now in charge of monitoring and regulating political conduct. In other words, a job that previously belonged to public, somewhat accountable entities now rests in private, totally unaccountable hands.
What does this portend? Facebook is a business that offers its services to customers in exchange for their information. That business model conflicts with any vigorous interest in protecting user privacy. Moreover, Facebook sells this information to political campaigns, which places parts of the company squarely in the political consultancy universe—a path that rarely leads to impartiality or sincere concern for the public’s best interests. Facebook announced last year that it would hire an additional 3000 staff to supplement the 4500 employees who already monitor its site for inappropriate content. Eventually these people will be displaced by artificial intelligence, but in the meantime, this extensive regulatory effort will eat away at Facebook’s profits.
The track record of private entities pursuing public purposes is not encouraging. Think Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or military contractors fighting in Iraq. To be sure, the delegation of public functions to private entities can sometimes have advantages, but usually at the cost of lower public accountability and some mission distortion. Moreover, with respect to Facebook, there is no detailed contractual language to follow, no supervising agency to watch over them.
In addition, the rules of appropriate political discourse just get fuzzier and more complicated. A globalized world economy encourages cross-national discourse about and interest in what other countries are doing politically. Is it wrong for Europeans or the Russians to try to tell us what they think about our politics or how Americans should vote when the US has such a heavy role in world affairs?
I personally have no problem with foreigners doing so as long as they are transparent about their identity and observe the rules of independent spending (e.g. no coordination with those running for office). But no one, foreign or domestic, should be hacking into emails or stealing material from candidates and their campaigns.
Disclosure is important. People depend as much (or more) on the source of information as they do the content. If the source is trustworthy to them, they accord it more credibility. In addition, transparency provides a check against corruption by revealing who owes what to whom.
But the longstanding bipartisan consensus in the US about disclosure has broken down in recent years. As partisan temperatures have risen, the case for protecting speech through anonymity has garnered more currency, preventing Democrats and Republicans from coming to any agreement about the full disclosure of soft money donors. Even though in theory many social media posts could be construed as in-kind or purchased contributions, it is unlikely that the Congress would impose, or that the Supreme Court would even allow, disclosure requirements on them. We can only hope that disclosure will be incentivized and encouraged by the social media platforms in creative ways.
So what can we expect of this new world of privatized political regulation? Given that Facebook, Google and other social media are interested in profits, they might travel a path similar to the one that large, public corporations followed after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision in 2010. Many experts predicted that these companies would rush in to take advantage of their right to make unlimited independent expenditures, but in fact few did for fear of backlash from consumers. It is possible that the social media companies will try to walk a similarly cautious, non-alienating path.
The safest choice for excluding objectionable content is to focus on only that which is clearly subversive of the political system or imposes serious harm on others (like bullying and harassment). Excluding content that is merely kooky, clearly wrong, or delusional (as opposed to truly subversive or violent) is problematic at best and may not be worth the effort.
It is problematic because many liberals think that conservative doctrine is delusional while many conservatives think the same of liberal doctrine. Drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable content figures to be a never-ending headache for the companies and their monitoring armies. It also may not be worth the effort because the web has many dark corners and alternative pathways. Besides, the best way to expose conspiracy theories and other fantasies is to let others examine and fact check the assertions publicly.
No doubt, there are many who believe that the political system is too entrenched and institutionally corrupt to ever regulate the political process competently. They may also believe that we are better off letting high tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and his legion of staff make critical decisions about the regulation of our democracy than the Congress, FEC, and the courts. Time will tell, but count me as skeptical.
Instead, I place my hope in younger generations becoming more skeptical of what they read on the web or in tweets, particularly when the sources are anonymous or mysterious. In the end, the quality of a democracy rests on the enlightenment and civic commitment of its citizens. That is what we have to trust.