Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
25 October 2019 (Athens, Greece) – During his now-becoming-famous (infamous?) address at Georgetown University last week Mark Zuckerberg said:
People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world. It’s a fifth estate, alongside the other power structures in our society.
For those of us of a certain age, Zuckerberg was appropriating a countercultural term: beginning in the nineteen-sixties, “the fifth estate” referred to alternative media in the United States. Which we actually clipped from Middle Ages England (see “Endnote” below). Now the head of a new-media monopoly was using the term to differentiate Facebook from the news media, presumably to bolster his argument that Facebook should not be held to the same standards of civic responsibility to which we hold the fourth estate.
And side note: my thanks to Jon Evans of Techcrunch for letting me “appropriate” the title to this piece from his blog post about Facebook to which I will refer later.
But there is a piece missing. The news media have traditionally borne the responsibility for ensuring that the actual purpose of the First Amendment is fulfilled. But as Masha Gessen, the Russian journalist and professor at Amherst College (and an expert on autocracy) has noted:
Americans seem content to leave this essential component of democracy to profit-driven corporations with next to no regulatory oversight. We accept it as the natural order of things that the flow and volume of news is largely determined by the needs of advertisers, and that, when advertising dollars dry up, so does the news. We are so afraid of censorship—or, perhaps more accurately, we have such lazy ways of thinking about accountability—that we would rather let newspapers die and media corporations form monopolies than consider government regulation and public funding.
I’ll address journalism in a bit, especially the money-driven aspects. For instance, we now know the New York Times had the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse story several years go but sat on it because of the fear entertainment industry advertising dollars might dry up. More in a bit. But Masha has it right: most of the public conversation about news media – as facilitated by the news media – has devolved to the level of a knee-jerk response to the First Amendment question. Much like Zuckerberg in his free-speech speech, or in his stubborn refusal to remove misleading political ads, we talk about rights without talking about responsibilities. This is what has allowed Facebook to evade responsibility, and to avoid even being identified as a media company.
To be an informed citizen is a daunting task. To try and understand the digital technologies associated with Silicon Valley – social media platforms, big data, mobile technology and artificial intelligence – and how they have increasingly dominated economic, political and social life – takes time. Yes, our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. And in most cases, we just do not take the time, engrossed in the day-to-day tasks of making a living. And the Internet … for most of us … has changed the way we think. It puts us all in the present tense. It’s as if our cognitive resources are shifted from our hard drive to our RAM. That which is happening right now is valued, and everything in the past or future becomes less relevant. The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. We forget what came before.
So herein a few points about the Facebook “public square”.
JOURNALISM
I’m a media guy. I tend to look at the way things are presented before I dive into the substance, the content. Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University last week had all the right “optics” (compared to his performance in Congress this week). The location was Georgetown’s Gaston Hall, intended (to me) to evoke both Facebook’s relatable roots (college!) and its subsequent ascent to gravitas (dark wood, stained glass, proximity to Capitol Hill). Zuckerberg wore a black long-sleeve shirt — the Hacker Way equivalent of formalwear — and he read from two teleprompters – adding studied pauses and hand gestures. His thesis was that free speech is good.
Wow.
Zuckerberg’s narrative, as many have summarized, is that freedom of speech, guaranteed by technological progress, is the beginning and the end of the conversation; this narrative willfully leaves out the damage that technological progress and unchallenged freedom of all speech can inflict. But the problem isn’t just Zuckerberg; more precisely, Zuckerberg is symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
On the whole, Zuckerberg tried to chart a middle course between his two loudest, angriest constituencies: the voices, mostly on the left, pushing for him to take down much more content than Facebook currently does; and the voices, mostly on the right, that complain Facebook is an engine for censorship that actively suppresses their views. It’s the only tenable position for someone who is trying to serve the largest number of customers, no matter their political views.
And he made a selective mash-up of things. This sort of blithe techno-utopian narrative isn’t entirely wrong, but it leaves so much out. Zuckerberg always makes a passing reference to the printing press. And when he does he uses it as a metonym for the inevitable march of progress — made only more efficient by great men of history, such as Johannes Gutenberg (and Mark Zuckerberg?)
But as I wrote in a piece last year, the printing press didn’t only lead to progress. It also led to anti-Semitic violence, the spread of medical misinformation, and about a century of religious wars. Zuckerberg always portrays himself as a liberator, taking power from gatekeepers and redistributing it to the people. He has always emphasized the pleasant effects of this redistribution, such as Egypt’s democratic uprising in 2011, while ignoring the less pleasant effects, such as Egypt’s subsequent descent into theocracy and proto-autocracy. Now that the list of countries suffering under proto-autocratic leadership has grown to include India, the Philippines, Brazil, and the United States – and given that this is no random quirk of history but one attributable, in large part, to Facebook itself – it’s long past time for Zuckerberg to come up with a new ideology, or at least a new branding strategy.
Journalism, in many ways, has been screwed over. Demagogues and the alt-right have learned how to play the system. Journalists report facts. It’s not their job to rebut every insane conspiracy theory that’s dreamed up as a counter-narrative. We’re collectively getting dumber because the reality-based one-half of the world is being asked to fact-check the fantastical half, at expense of new knowledge.
And … there is a fundamental paradox of reporting on the so-called “alt-right”: doing so without amplifying that ideology is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. Reporting may be complicit in spreading far-right messaging and helping the movement grow.
And journalism’s money issues are paramount. Just one example, coming out this week, about Newsweek, a newsmagazine once considered one of the “big three,” alongside Time and the US News & World Report. Journalists have now been instructed to “up their game”. Forget the long, substantive pieces. Go for volume of pieces. Go for headlines that appeal both to a reader and to Google’s algorithms … but in practice the algorithm takes precedence. The new “workrate” provides a bonus-for-page-views-structure, the logical outcome of ad-driven internet journalism. It’s the continuing spiral of print, and journalism in general.
It had made Facebook the new version of the public square, only it’s private. The exponential growth of big tech platforms in information delivery has led to the digital disaggregation of the newspaper business, and other old line media. The scale and greed of countless culprits has spun the internet geologic clock backward. A realm that once comprised countless nations has become a supercontinent, a monolith of homogenized use and mood. We have “hell sites” (Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and 4chan to name but four), not web sites, that manage to be more existentially unsatisfying everyday, manipulating our traditional knowledge ecosystem.
And technology’s most aggressive contribution to all of this? We turn to radicalization. The radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life – injecting new information – but at scale. The quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand. The supply has grown because YouTube appeals to right-wing content creators, with its low barrier to entry, easy way to make money, and reliance on video, which is easier to create and more impactful than text. As I noted, I am a media guy. This is attractive for a lone, fringe political commentator, who can produce enough video content to establish themselves as a major source of media for a fanbase of any size, without needing to acquire power or legitimacy by working their way up a corporate media ladder.
I have covered many of these points in detail in previous blog posts, but for a summary I suggest (humbly) my review of the International Journalism Festival (“the struggle to deplete the Internet of the oxygen of toxic amplification”), an event held every year in Perugia, Italy. My review is a (very, very) long read but I cover all the major themes. And the reason the Perugia event is so great is simply: there is not one journalism event or media event or “knowledge” event like it anywhere – swooning, soul-enriching, brutal in-your-face real conversations by/from/with/between/among the biggest names and most thoughtful people and media players. And what’s amazing? Attendance to IJF is free to the public, and not one presenter or panel member is paid by the event organizers (this year saw 340 sessions and 810 speakers over the 5-day program). All presenters/panelists attend under their own steam – their own travel, their own accommodations, their own meals.
FREE SPEECH AND IDEOLOGICAL BLIND SPOTS
Zuckerberg’s relentless optimism is simply a canny P.R. strategy, to fight regulation. But the more alarming scenario is that Zuckerberg is actually high on his own supply — that, despite everything, he remains an unreconstructed techno-utopian. If the past few years haven’t been enough to puncture his faith, it’s hard to imagine what would.
This sort of ideological blind spot would be worrisome coming from anyone. Coming from the most powerful person on the Internet, and thus one of the most powerful people on the planet, it’s far more dangerous. I mean, hell. Zuck said:
“Sometimes we take two steps forward and one step back.”
Hey, dude! How about ten steps back? My (very) abbreviated list of recent “steps back,” each enabled to some degree by Facebook:
• Brexit
• the Trump Presidency
• the resurgence of unapologetic white nationalism in the U.S.
• a rash of mass killings in Sri Lanka
• the Rohingya genocide.
For Zuckerberg to go on downplaying the downsides of his invention – what he called, in his speech, the “messiness” on humanity’s “long journey towards greater progress” – is, at best, shockingly tone-deaf. As Andrew Marantz noted in his blog for The New Yorker magazine:
This is an indication that no matter how many brick walls our Silicon Valley overlords lead us into, they will go on thinking of them as mere bumps in the road.
This strategy of claiming not to be the media has worked well for Facebook. When Bloomberg broke the news that Zuckerberg has advised the U.S. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on campaign hires, the tech media fawned:
• Zuckerberg “one of tech’s most powerful executives”
• Mark and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are “two of America’s most influential businesspeople and philanthropists.”
• “the world’s third-richest person” gets involved in politics
Nobody seemed troubled by the “frame”: a Presidential campaign in bed with a major tech corporation, influenced by and possibly intertwined with one of the country’s richest men.
Now imagine if it were the head of ABC or CNN or the New York Times Company who had served as an informal hiring consultant to a Presidential candidate. It would almost certainly be a bigger story and more broadly perceived as troublesome. Most of us still believe that the media are an essential component of democracy, and that a media outlet that is partisan or committed to a single candidate, but not in a transparent way, is a bad democratic actor.
With Facebook and other new media, technology has accelerated and amplified existing processes and problems. Facebook is not an anomaly in the American media system—it is precisely the result of rampant profit-seeking, lazy thinking, and a lack of civic responsibility. Of course Zuckerberg tells Buttigieg whom to hire. Of course he sees Warren, and not Trump, as an existential threat. Of course Facebook allows Trump to run false ads. The company doesn’t know what the First Amendment is for – and we are not making it learn.
And as far as Facebook repeatedly taking actions that benefit Republicans and the right-wing, especially over the last few months, it’s a smart business decision (this is America: it’s all about, only about the money). Everyone in power is a Republican. And that will remain so for awhile, despite the dreams (illusions?) of the Democrats.
So in these final two sections, let’s get to the nub of what Facebook is, and the technology it hides behind it.
AMPLIFIED RAGE
In his Georgetown University speech, Zuckerberg extolled “giving everyone a voice” and fighting “to uphold a wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible.” The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site.
But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little.
What is amplified? Two forms of content:
1. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook.
2. Therefore you spend more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.
Yes, Facebook works to stop things like hoaxes and medical misinformation from going viral, even if they’re otherwise anointed by the algorithm. But he has specifically decided that Facebook will not attempt to stop paid political misinformation from going viral.
I personally disagree with this decision. It is deeply disingenuous to claim that this is somehow about defending free speech. If someone were to try to place a blatantly false political ad on any platform or network, would anyone seriously consider a decision not to run that ad an attack on free speech? Of course not.
But the larger issue is one raised by Jon Evans (the chap who let me “appropriate” part of his blog for my title) who writes:
Facebook seems to think that if an algorithm is content-agnostic, it is therefore fair. When Zuckerberg talks about giving people a voice, he really means giving those people selected by Facebook’s algorithm a voice. When he says “People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate,” what he actually means is that Facebook’s algorithm is itself that Fifth Estate.
The belief is apparently that any human judgement based on content beyond the absolute minimum required by law and implied by the social contract — i.e. filtering out hate speech, abuses, or dangerous medical misinformation, all of which he stresses in his speech — is dangerous and wrong, and that this goes for both native content and paid advertising. According to this belief, Facebook’s algorithm, so long as it is content-agnostic, is definitionally fair.
I have written in detail about this but in short: “optimizing for engagement” all too often means optimizing for outrage, for polarization, for disingenuous misinformation. True, it doesn’t mean favoring any side of any given issue; but it does mean favoring the extremes, the conspiracy theorists, the histrionic diatribes on all sides. It means fomenting mistrust, suspicion, and conflict everywhere. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived it.
And so as Jon writes:
Facebook’s decision to accept political ads regardless of content is essentially a logical extension of how their algorithm optimizes for engagement. It speaks to their belief that as long as they don’t pass judgement based on content, their ongoing, ceaseless editing of what people see and don’t see — and please call it censorship if you think this is in any way about freedom of speech — is therefore fair and just. This belief was defensible ten or even five years ago. It is not defensible today.
But it is also not going to change. Facebook’s original sin is not political ads; it is optimizing for engagement. To change means … oh, it will never change because that engagement is the fundamental engine of their business model.
HIDING BEHIND TECHNOLOGY
Earlier this year Facebook said it was giving social scientists “unprecedented access to its data” so that they can investigate how social-media platforms can influence elections and alter democracies. But it immediately hit a major snag over privacy. Facebook would not lease the data “to protect users privacy”.
The goal of the project was to enable academic researchers to study how social media is influencing democracies – and to establish a model of collaboration that would allow scientists to take advantage of tech companies’ rich troves of data.
Facebook has released data but at issue is the amount and type of information that Facebook has been able to give external researchers. Data sets released so far, for example, include 32 million links, or URLs, each of which has been shared since 1 January 2017 by at least 100 users with their privacy settings set to ‘public’. These links include some valuable information, such as ratings of the page’s trustworthiness as scored by third-party fact-checking sites.
But the company had promised to give researchers access to URLs that were shared publicly only once, and to a wider range of demographic data about users. This is a bigger data set of around one billion links and would include those that were largely shared privately. Because fake news tends to circulate in links that are shared privately, the data on public shares are not a good proxy for how misinformation spreads in general. So the data that Facebook is offering is more or less useless.
Facebook does its own research on the impact of information shared on its platform. But academics want to carry out their own studies that are not subject to vetting by the company. This is a problem because to do such research, external academics often need to access proprietary information, which then means that their results would need company’s pre-publication approval.
And a few other technical points. Researchers and analysts know that Twitter is almost certainly not where most of the information warfare and manipulation happens – it’s simply the most visible to researchers willing to kick up a fuss about it. But Twitter makes it easy. Twitter’s API is far more accessible, hence more research based on it.
But it is Facebook that is the black hole of audience manipulation. You can see how fake news spreads far more widely on FB vs Twitter but you need to use tools like BuzzSumo and Open Semantic Search to do the heavy digging.
FINAL THOUGHTS: FACEBOOK’S POWER
What is critically important when it comes to Facebook’s power is the various means by which that power could be realized.
The first and most straightforward way is Facebook putting its thumb on the scale. This is a concern that arose recently with the leaked audio of an all-hands meeting where Zuckerberg was reported as being willing to “go to the mat” versus Elizabeth Warren. This is Zuckerberg’s obvious intention to fight any potential antitrust lawsuits – a useful reminder that Facebook’s power is to be feared, and an argument the company is simply too large.
The second concern is the capacity of trolls, both of the profit-seeking and foreign government variety, to leverage Facebook’s fundamental engagement-seeking nature to push misinformation and division. The company claims it has made substantial investments in this area, both in terms of identifying bad actors and in taking down problematic content; Facebook puts these investments forward as an argument that the company’s size is an asset.
The third concern is what has dominated the news cycle as of late: Facebook’s decision to not fact-check any posts or ads from politicians. This is largely being framed as aiding Trump in particular, which is probably both true and also an unsurprising complaint from the Second Estate used to having monopoly control over fact-checking.
The broader issue is that the third concern and first concern are so clearly in direct opposition to each other. If Facebook has the potential for immense influence on politics, why on earth would anyone want the company policing political speech?
Social media technology has transformed politics and society irrevocably, in a dystopian way, that we are only now slowly grasping. Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality. And that’s now been dissolved out from under us, and we don’t have a mechanism to address that problem.
The Internet expands the horizon of every utterance or expressive act to a potentially planetary level. This makes it impossible to imagine a purely local context or public for anything that anyone creates today. It also de-centres the idea of the global from any privileged location. No place is any more or less the centre of the world than any other anymore. As people who once sensed that they inhabited the intellectual margins of the contemporary world simply because of the nature of geo-political arrangements, we know that nothing can be quite as debilitating as the constant production of proof of one’s significance. The Internet has changed this one fact comprehensively. The significance, worth or import of one’s statements is no longer automatically tied to the physical facts of one’s location along a still unequal geo-political map.
If you pull far enough back from the day to day debate over technology’s impact on society – far enough that Facebook’s destabilization of democracy, Amazon’s conquering of capitalism, and Google’s domination of our data flows start to blend into one broader, more cohesive picture – what does that picture communicate about the state of humanity today? We have clothed ourselves in newly discovered data, we have yoked ourselves to new algorithmic harnesses, and we are waking to the human costs of this new practice.
So let’s take a look at that “divinity of data” …
COMING IN PART 2
Part 2: “The divinity of data, the flimsy fabric of computation – and technology’s unavoidable endgame”
Many of us tech geeks are romantics – we spend a lifetime looking for technology that will solve our problems. We “believe” in it. And I suspect everyone is a romantic at heart however much they try to keep it hidden:
Parent of golden dreams, Romance!
Auspicious queen of childish joys,
Who lead’st along, in airy dance,
Thy votive train of girls and boys.
– Lord Byron, “To Romance”
Lately it seems all the tech world can do is create a new herd of incurable problems that are worse than the problems meant to be “solved”. The irony is that the promise of technology as a guarantee of future well-being has become increasingly powerful … and made the future as insecure as ever.
* * * * * * * * * * *
ENDNOTE
The Internet and the Third Estate
Zuckerberg began his speech last week by attempting to place free expression in the historical American context, and only then turned to discuss free expression in the context of Facebook, where he proposed something much more modern:
People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands. It’s part of this amazing expansion of voice through law, culture and technology.
As I noted, Zuckerberg was appropriating a countercultural term: beginning in the nineteen-sixties, “the fifth estate” referred to alternative media in the United States. But the Fourth Estate – the press – was Zuckerberg’s focus in that while the Fourth Estate entailed gatekeepers the Fifth Estate does not, for both better and worse. It’s a compelling framing, and one that certainly puts in perspective the tension that exists between the press and Facebook in particular: no gatekeeper likes to lose their monopoly on the distribution of information.
It’s also a framing that is, appropriately enough, uniquely American; in the United States, the first three estates are commonly thought to be the three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial. It is the press that holds all three accountable, and in Zuckerberg’s telling, the Fifth Estate that gives everyone else a voice.
There is, though, another way to think about social media that is perhaps even more compelling, with a story that draws not from American history but rather European. And I owe a debt of gratitude to long-time Linkedin friend Peter Stannack, CEO of Prebbler Technologies and self-described “Machine Intelligence Integrator” (but I’d also call him a polymath). He keyed me into a book The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga from which much of the following is sourced, as well as from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation.
Europe’s Three Estates
In Europe the first three estates are a reference to how society was organized throughout the Middle Ages: the First Estate was the church, the second was the nobility, and the third were the commoners. By the 1700s those estates, at least in England, had become branches of government: the King (the First Estate), the House of Lords (the Second Estate), and the House of Commons (the Third Estate); this was the context for Edmund Burke’s remarks in 1787 that “There are Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”
With this context, the European reading of the Fourth Estate is actually rather akin to the American one: the press is an independent force holding the government accountable. And so, again, Zuckerberg’s characterization of social media as the Fifth Estate makes sense.
Without this context, though, social media as the Fifth Estate would not make sense at all: after all, “people having the power to express themselves at scale”, to use Zuckerberg’s words, is about giving the commoners a voice — but the commoners are the Third Estate! In fact, in the medieval period where the three estates existed the press as fourth estate wouldn’t have made much sense either, given that the printing press didn’t even exist.
The Printing Press
That the clergy came first was not an accident: in the Middle Ages the principle organizing entity for Europe was the Catholic Church. Relatedly, the Catholic Church also held a de facto monopoly on the distribution of information: most books were in Latin, copied laboriously by hand by monks. There was some degree of ethnic affinity between various members of the nobility and the commoners on their lands, but underneath the umbrella of the Catholic Church were primarily independent city-states.
The printing press changed all of this. Suddenly Martin Luther, whose critique of the Catholic Church was strikingly similar to Jan Hus 100 years earlier, was not limited to spreading his beliefs to his local area (Prague in the case of Hus), but could rather see those beliefs spread throughout Europe; the nobility seized the opportunity to interpret the Bible in a way that suited their local interests, gradually shaking off the control of the Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, the economics of printing books was fundamentally different from the economics of copying by hand. The latter was purely an operational expense: output was strictly determined by the input of labor. The former, though, was mostly a capital expense: first, to construct the printing press, and second, to set the type for a book. The best way to pay for these significant up-front expenses was to produce as many copies of a particular book that could be sold.
How, then, to maximize the number of copies that could be sold? The answer was to print using the most widely used dialect of a particular language, which in turn incentivized people to adopt that dialect, standardizing language across Europe. That, by extension, deepened the affinities between city-states with shared languages, particularly over decades as a shared culture developed around books and later newspapers. This consolidation occurred at varying rates — England and France several hundred years before Germany and Italy — but in nearly every case the First Estate became not the clergy of the Catholic Church but a national monarch, even as the monarch gave up power to a new kind of meritocratic nobility epitomized by Burke.
In other words, Burke’s Fourth Estate was the means by which the Second Estate overthrew the first.
The Second Estate and the Press
I would go further (just a little): just as the Catholic Church ensured its primacy by controlling information, the modern meritocracy has done the same, not so much by controlling the press but rather by incorporating it into a broader national consensus. Here again economics play a role: while books are still sold for a profit, over the last 150 years newspapers have become more widely read, and then television became the dominant medium. All, though, were vehicles for the “press”, which was primarily funded through advertising, which was inextricably tied up with large enterprise.
Therein ends today’s history lesson.