Has Facebook Failed Us?
Facebook is not what it once was. Back in its heyday it was the social network. It had an it-factor that made everyone want to join. If you watched The Social Network, you saw how it spread like wildfire among college students, moving from campus to campus. Facebook was the big leap that interconnected our world. The internet may have connected academics and governments, but it took a social network, the social network, to connect individuals. Nowadays, college students barely give Facebook a second thought. Instagram and Snapchat are more popular, and, in the wave of new social media, Facebook has fallen behind. However, Facebook is still in the mainstream. Facebook has shifted from targeting college students to trying to be there for everyone. Only professionals will join LinkedIn, and only people with something to show off will join Instagram, but everyone can find a spot on Facebook. This was not an accident. This was a carefully planned move by their leadership to make Facebook a place for everyone. This choice has put Facebook in a very precarious role in our democracy. With the reach that posts on Facebook have, Facebook’s rules on political advertisements can quite seriously affect election results, and choices by their leadership have perpetuated the political divide in our country. Unfortunately, the speed of Facebook’s growth overwhelmed our legal system, and they currently operate with near impunity in their world-altering decisions.
After the 2016 election, a heated series of hearings were held in the House Financial Services Committee with Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook. One heated back and forth occurred between Zuckerberg and Representative Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez asked Zuckerberg whether she would be allowed to place Facebook advertisements that stated a Republican politician supported the green new deal. Zuckerberg struggled with the question, saying that “lying is bad…[but] I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians, that they may or may not vote for, are saying.” Up until recently, Facebook operated solely based on this idea, and almost completely refused to regulate any political advertisements. Their policy basically stated that any politician who wanted an ad on Facebook would be able to put one up. As one of the biggest platforms for advertisements, alongside its extensive user demographics database, Facebook advertisements can have some of the most widespread, and most precisely targeted advertisements. Take, for example, the recent revelations that the Trump campaign used Facebook to target individual Black voters in efforts to deter them from voting. Facebook not only facilitated this heavily targeted, manipulative advertising but also actively profited off of it. Facebook plays an incredibly important, and still growing, role in our democracy. The rules that they have set for their advertisements and the ways in which they continue to profit off of dirty campaigning should worry anyone who hopes that our democracy will heal.
Another area where Facebook spreads information is in user-shared posts. Users share millions of posts, and Facebook uses precisely tuned algorithms to only show you posts that will constrain you to your social bubble. The social bubbles that exist on Facebook have a great potential to spread misinformation, and Facebook has designed their algorithms to keep you isolated from any opposing viewpoints. If you ever have the chance to look at the top posts on Facebook, you might be surprised by the contents. Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, publishes a top-ten posts list every day, and while you might expect what you see on other social networks, some celebrities, some cool videos of dogs, you instead see a wave of right-wing media. List after list is covered in Breitbart, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro and Fox News. Facebook’s algorithms consistently isolate viewpoints, causing articles like these to bounce around in hyper-conservative bubbles while shielding either side of the aisle from intellectual discussion.
By further isolating users in their own little confirmation bubble, Facebook is further fracturing our society
Now, you might wonder why the same effect wouldn’t be seen with left-wing media, balancing out the top-ten list. The answer is in the structure of the American media system. Conservative media is hyper-centralized, composed of a few key companies and individuals that all quote and source from each other. This is in contrast to the liberal media system, where there is a greater variety of authors, main-stream companies, and careful analysis.
This kind of viewpoint isolation only exacerbates our political divide. Facebook shows you what it thinks will keep you on the site. For politics, that means showing you the same creators and the same viewpoints over and over again. Confirmation bias is a dangerous phenomenon, and this cycle of content just streams into your brain. In Facebook’s system, users on both sides of the aisle will only ever see news confirming their biases. Given Facebook’s already lax rules on misinformation, many users are more likely to be presented with false news before they ever come into contact with content that they disagree with. Facebook’s former director of monetization Time Kendall describes these decisions as having “served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity. At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war.” Anyone who looks online, watches the news, or walks through a residential area can tell you that politics are increasingly entering our lives. People are clinging to their political identities in this time of crisis, and Facebook is only fueling separation between the two parties. By further isolating users in their own little confirmation bubbles, Facebook is further fracturing our society by party. When both sides can’t even agree on the facts, there is little room for discussion or progress.
It’s scary to think about how much power Facebook has, especially given how little regulation it faces. Over 7 in 10 US adults use Facebook, and yet there are almost no laws that restrict how Facebook can behave. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides Facebook virtual free rein on decisions of what to show users, be it truth or lies. Section 230 states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This means that no matter what is published on Facebook, as long as it is done by a third party, Facebook will face no repercussions for it. This means that Facebook can host anything from slander to hate speech and has full legal protections. This provides Facebook with no legal incentive to regulate its posts. While the recent actions of the legislature seem to indicate some willingness to bring Facebook to heel, that may well be years away while our democracy suffers every day because of it.
Normally, the kind of regulation we should see on Facebook would come from our government. It’s the government that sets the rules about advertisements and lying (spoiler: there aren’t a lot). However, the government did not grow with the times. One of the scarier parts of Section 230 is that it was written in 1996, 8 years before Facebook was even founded. That means that Facebook, a site where more than 40% of Americans got their news in 2016, is governed by a 24-year-old law that predates most of the modern internet and provides extremely broad freedom to publish anything they want. To this day, there are still people on Capitol Hill who show a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of technology.
Facebook’s job is to regulate the misinformation problem, and it has failed to do so.
President Trump’s new call to repeal Section 230 has been taken up by many in his party. However, that call shows a dangerous misunderstanding of the internet. Repealing Section 230 means that Facebook would have to have their lawyers go through literally every post on the platform, effectively killing it. New regulation is required for Facebook, but most current politicians show a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet. Without new regulation, Facebook can basically operate as they see fit in their restriction (or lack thereof) of lies, extremist groups, and terrorism.
Facebook is harming our democracy; it is sowing derision and misinformation. Facebook may well have swung the 2016 election to Trump, and its decisions about false advertisements and conspiracy theory groups may well decide the 2020 election. Our laws clearly do little to protect us from Facebook’s decisions, and those decisions have caused division in our country. Yet we should not be surprised that Facebook is like this. Facebook sought to make itself as widespread as possible. By growing its demographics, Facebook became a mirror of our real society, the ‘big tent’ social network if you will. The issues we see on Facebook are those which we see in real life. Facebook’s failure is in regulating a misinformation problem that already existed in society. We as a society have perpetuated the very issues that Facebook now monetizes. They can only increase the partisan divide that is already there; they only post false ads if there is money to pay for them. We have to ask ourselves why it was so advantageous to keep us in our own political bubbles. How can we make it less profitable for Facebook to run false ads? The problems that exist in our society are not Facebook’s fault. Any solution to them will include new and important regulation of Facebook. Yet we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that Facebook was the source of our fake news problem, or that disbanding Facebook might somehow save our democracy. Our society is shaking, and, as we reimagine how our democracy will function, we have to reimagine the role that Facebook will play.