Zuck owns Facebook. Jack owns Twitter. Biden is president. At Reason, Robby Soave argues that the war over Section 230, reining in disinformation, hate speech, harassment and whatever other ills come at you through the ether, is really about the big question: Who should be in charge of the web?
Note as well that bowing to the Vietnamese government’s demand for greater censorship is being treated as a bad thing by some of the same outlets that are shaming Facebook for not bowing to the U.S. government’s request for greater censorship. The site’s failure to take down extremism, hate speech, and misinformation related to U.S. presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic is considered a grave moral failing. U.S. senators scream at Facebook for doing the bidding of other governments while engaged in the very act of trying to compel Facebook to do the bidding of the U.S. Senate.
That’s the central idea behind the mainstream media’s framing of the Facebook Papers: The social media site is unsafe because there’s too much content that the mainstream media and the government would prefer users not see. They’re upset that the person in charge of deciding what belongs on Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg and not Joe Biden—and no amount of handwringing about addictive platforms or monopolistic practices can disguise the fact that the site is losing popularity with young people, and increasingly looks like a dying star.
Whether FB has lost its panache is a question about which I know nothing, as I’m neither a fan nor user. And it may well be that the battle is about who gets to own the minds in our impressionable youth, strong, passionate and dumber than dirt so that they can be easily manipulated to believe what they’re told to believe, provided it’s reduced to small words and short slogans.
But the argument Robby raises has long been one of real concern. Sure, FB is a private company, and Zuck can censor or not as he deems fit, but nobody in government seems all that thrilled at the prospect of private corporations, particularly those controlled by individuals, having vastly more influence over the minds of mush than they do.
And to be fair, just because Zuck’s baby beat out MySpace for the hip place to pretend your life doesn’t suck, and then later to get a million likes before it does, does not make Mark Zuckerberg a good steward of the public consciousness. Nobody elected him to be censor in chief, except that by clicking on your acceptance of his TOS you kinda did vote with your keyboard.
But what about the alternatives, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump to whoever comes after? Would they be better stewards of the web? The progressive argument of the moment is that Biden certainly would, assuming of course that he puts some trusted deputy in charge of the nuts and bolts. Maybe Neera Tanden or Mary Anne Franks would be suitable to the current administration. Would they be your choice?
But the assumption that the Democrats will hold power for 10,000 years, unless the Republicans cheat and steal the election if that sounds familiar, might be a bit rosy. That they fail to consider placing the power in the hands of Darth Cheeto seems too obvious to dispute.
Should the breadth of acceptable discourse be left to the discretion of unaccountable nerds or put into the hands of the Senate confirmed Minister of Truth? Whom would you trust to decide the worthiness of your words and ideas, other than yourself and me? As Humpty Dumpty presciently put it, “Who is to be master; that is all”?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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