I fear none of this changes until the financial incentives change and I don't see that happening. IMO, most of the disinformation is now driven by trolling and grifting. Sure, ther are true believers and legitimate debaters but, as DiResta pointed out in her brilliant Twitter thread (and I see the irony) there was a time before SOCIAL media when these folks couldn't escalate their message exponentially. The business model of Tech, (growth at all costs) seems to be a really big piece of how we arrived where we are.
In my working life (I am retired) I had a window into the lives of many people that were, at best, high school graduates. They lived paycheck to paycheck, they rarely, if ever, talked about issues, they were open to whatever nonsense FB was circulating, conspiracies made a lot of sense to them, in other words they are perfect targets for disinformation. How do we reach them? How do we clean up the narratives? Seems overwhelming to me......
Full disclosure, I have never had a FB page. My only social media is Twitter, and I use it as a news aggregator.
Free speech advocates are not being dishonest about what the government is doing here. As Facebook's regulator, with people in congress speaking openly about breaking it up as a monopoly, the government cannot neutrally flag problematic Facebook posts for moderation without it being an endrun around the first amendment.
For one, there's no such entity called "the government." No government at any level is a disindivuated mass with a single-minded end. We have the three branches, plus the military, federal law enforcement/courts/prisons, and the regulatory and administrative departments. And they constantly work at cross-purposes with one another.
This follows to the second point. How would the government structure we have right now implement and enforce social media censorship? First, would an existing agency (NSA, FTC, Secret Service) be tasked with hiring people to monitor and enforce censorship, or would a new one be created? Second, how would all of this fly under the noses of Congress or the president? They would be the ones who'd determine which agency gets the assignment, their scope and their funding. Third, it can't be done in secret because it will eventually get out (see Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Reality Winner, et al). Fourth, this threat is unconstitutional on its face and wouldn't survive the courts.
The monopoly breakup threat conflates something different. Anti-monopoly targets Facebook as a business entity. If the government can successfully prosecute an antitrust case against Facebook, the remedy is usually divestiture. Facebook would likely have to spin off its business units, like Instagram for example, or perhaps separate its advertising unit from the social media infrastructure the public uses.
See the example of the breakup of the phone company monopoly in 1982. AT&T could not plead that breaking up its monopoly would inhibit free speech because it would prevent its customers from talking to one another.
All great points though I don't know if there needs to be a conspiracy to the extent you're describing. Let's face it, since 2016 the big social media platforms have been worried about what the government might do to stem the reality that social media often amplifies antisocial and even dangerous expressions. Of course, these ideas have always been with us, but they were less effective when they were relegated to hand published zines and chain letters. Point being, if you're an executive at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple or the like, you know that the government is, in general, looking your way.
Meanwhile, the White House says it has people looking at Facebook posts and flagging them for Facebook's moderators. If you're a Facebook executive in these circumstances, how seriously would you take these suggestons, coming from the White House? Maybe if I made the exact same suggestion they would say, " see your point, but we're going to let this stand." When it comes from the White House instead of me, I bet they treat it less as a suggestion than a command.
Does working with the White House on this mean that they won't find themselves in antitrust litigation later? I doubt there's any sort of quid pro quo. But not poking a sleeping bear doesn't mean that the bear won't wake up and kill you. You still don't poke at it.
I think what's going on here really is unconstitutional. But you're going to have a hard time getting through the courts if what you're trying to protect is the right to bloviate misinformation about vaccines.
If it never goes farther than this, it will probably not become a massive issue. But the surgeon general wasn't talking just about COVID or even just about vaccinnes. The phrase he used was "health information." Just about anything can be considered "health information" from a certain point of view.
@Michael, you also raise very good points. I would be distrustful if and when government agents begin to lean on social media to stifle speech, or worse, dissemble disinformation or malinformation.
You should consider, like the White House personnel flagging Facebook content, whether it was ordinary or extraordinary measures. Facebook offers the flagging and reporting for any user. The White House has a press office and comms team, and monitoring and engaging with social media is part of the standard job duties. It's no different than any other government agency PR department, or how PR works in any public or private organization. If they are flagging and reporting based on violations of Facebook's terms of service, it falls under ordinary work.
Extraordinary would be something like Biden or another top official dressing down an executive, arranging a back-channel censorship out of public view, or most frightening of all, directing federal law enforcement personnel to order changes or menace Facebook personnel. Extraordinary would also be a denial of service directive.
Plus, social media executives are getting it from all sides. They're getting it from government actors both leftwing and rightwing, and the distinctions of their viewpoints are very important to maintain. This is because a leftwing, a rightwing and a techist (apologies if I exclude any viewpoints from the analysis) perspective on free speech all use the same words but ascribe completely different values to those words and are all playing vastly different gambits.
The social media companies must also justify their high investment valuations, which is the salient concern for Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey et al. They're also getting it from tech-savvy bad-faith actors all over the world -- many of which aren't even human.
I sometimes like to set aside questions of balance to simply consider the potential power and influence Facebook might have if it just decided to do good, which it could. Why, in other words, does Facebook seek to also amplify the bad? (Ask why give times.)
"...an unproductive, false binary of a conversation on a complex topic that deserves far more nuance. Ironically, the argument is a great example of social media-influenced and flattened discourse that is poisoning us all."
Loving these lines so much. I constantly wonder what it would take to replace the 'either-or' energy in our culture with 'and-and'. I achieved it personally by quitting Twitter & most corporate media, replacing my comforting sources with an uncomfortable news & commentary spectrum, from quite left to quite right. But I struggle to encourage even close friends to try it.
Another homerun Charlie!
I fear none of this changes until the financial incentives change and I don't see that happening. IMO, most of the disinformation is now driven by trolling and grifting. Sure, ther are true believers and legitimate debaters but, as DiResta pointed out in her brilliant Twitter thread (and I see the irony) there was a time before SOCIAL media when these folks couldn't escalate their message exponentially. The business model of Tech, (growth at all costs) seems to be a really big piece of how we arrived where we are.
In my working life (I am retired) I had a window into the lives of many people that were, at best, high school graduates. They lived paycheck to paycheck, they rarely, if ever, talked about issues, they were open to whatever nonsense FB was circulating, conspiracies made a lot of sense to them, in other words they are perfect targets for disinformation. How do we reach them? How do we clean up the narratives? Seems overwhelming to me......
Full disclosure, I have never had a FB page. My only social media is Twitter, and I use it as a news aggregator.
Free speech advocates are not being dishonest about what the government is doing here. As Facebook's regulator, with people in congress speaking openly about breaking it up as a monopoly, the government cannot neutrally flag problematic Facebook posts for moderation without it being an endrun around the first amendment.
@Michael, is this actually happening though?
For one, there's no such entity called "the government." No government at any level is a disindivuated mass with a single-minded end. We have the three branches, plus the military, federal law enforcement/courts/prisons, and the regulatory and administrative departments. And they constantly work at cross-purposes with one another.
This follows to the second point. How would the government structure we have right now implement and enforce social media censorship? First, would an existing agency (NSA, FTC, Secret Service) be tasked with hiring people to monitor and enforce censorship, or would a new one be created? Second, how would all of this fly under the noses of Congress or the president? They would be the ones who'd determine which agency gets the assignment, their scope and their funding. Third, it can't be done in secret because it will eventually get out (see Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Reality Winner, et al). Fourth, this threat is unconstitutional on its face and wouldn't survive the courts.
The monopoly breakup threat conflates something different. Anti-monopoly targets Facebook as a business entity. If the government can successfully prosecute an antitrust case against Facebook, the remedy is usually divestiture. Facebook would likely have to spin off its business units, like Instagram for example, or perhaps separate its advertising unit from the social media infrastructure the public uses.
See the example of the breakup of the phone company monopoly in 1982. AT&T could not plead that breaking up its monopoly would inhibit free speech because it would prevent its customers from talking to one another.
All great points though I don't know if there needs to be a conspiracy to the extent you're describing. Let's face it, since 2016 the big social media platforms have been worried about what the government might do to stem the reality that social media often amplifies antisocial and even dangerous expressions. Of course, these ideas have always been with us, but they were less effective when they were relegated to hand published zines and chain letters. Point being, if you're an executive at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple or the like, you know that the government is, in general, looking your way.
Meanwhile, the White House says it has people looking at Facebook posts and flagging them for Facebook's moderators. If you're a Facebook executive in these circumstances, how seriously would you take these suggestons, coming from the White House? Maybe if I made the exact same suggestion they would say, " see your point, but we're going to let this stand." When it comes from the White House instead of me, I bet they treat it less as a suggestion than a command.
Does working with the White House on this mean that they won't find themselves in antitrust litigation later? I doubt there's any sort of quid pro quo. But not poking a sleeping bear doesn't mean that the bear won't wake up and kill you. You still don't poke at it.
I think what's going on here really is unconstitutional. But you're going to have a hard time getting through the courts if what you're trying to protect is the right to bloviate misinformation about vaccines.
If it never goes farther than this, it will probably not become a massive issue. But the surgeon general wasn't talking just about COVID or even just about vaccinnes. The phrase he used was "health information." Just about anything can be considered "health information" from a certain point of view.
@Michael, you also raise very good points. I would be distrustful if and when government agents begin to lean on social media to stifle speech, or worse, dissemble disinformation or malinformation.
You should consider, like the White House personnel flagging Facebook content, whether it was ordinary or extraordinary measures. Facebook offers the flagging and reporting for any user. The White House has a press office and comms team, and monitoring and engaging with social media is part of the standard job duties. It's no different than any other government agency PR department, or how PR works in any public or private organization. If they are flagging and reporting based on violations of Facebook's terms of service, it falls under ordinary work.
Extraordinary would be something like Biden or another top official dressing down an executive, arranging a back-channel censorship out of public view, or most frightening of all, directing federal law enforcement personnel to order changes or menace Facebook personnel. Extraordinary would also be a denial of service directive.
Plus, social media executives are getting it from all sides. They're getting it from government actors both leftwing and rightwing, and the distinctions of their viewpoints are very important to maintain. This is because a leftwing, a rightwing and a techist (apologies if I exclude any viewpoints from the analysis) perspective on free speech all use the same words but ascribe completely different values to those words and are all playing vastly different gambits.
The social media companies must also justify their high investment valuations, which is the salient concern for Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey et al. They're also getting it from tech-savvy bad-faith actors all over the world -- many of which aren't even human.
Well said, my friend.
Excellent review of a problem that is far more wicked than most people realize, and getting worse. Very good links to great material.
I sometimes like to set aside questions of balance to simply consider the potential power and influence Facebook might have if it just decided to do good, which it could. Why, in other words, does Facebook seek to also amplify the bad? (Ask why give times.)
"...an unproductive, false binary of a conversation on a complex topic that deserves far more nuance. Ironically, the argument is a great example of social media-influenced and flattened discourse that is poisoning us all."
Loving these lines so much. I constantly wonder what it would take to replace the 'either-or' energy in our culture with 'and-and'. I achieved it personally by quitting Twitter & most corporate media, replacing my comforting sources with an uncomfortable news & commentary spectrum, from quite left to quite right. But I struggle to encourage even close friends to try it.