Mark Zuckerberg Knows Exactly How Bad Facebook Is

 

"“The Facebook Files” vindicates Sanders’s critique. Long before it banned Trump, Facebook gave him a special exemption. Along with other elite politicians and pundits, Trump was on a “whitelist” of figures who had immunity from normal enforcement rules. In May 2020, in response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder, Trump tweeted and also posted to Facebook an ominous warning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” An automated system rated these incendiary words as 90 out of 100 in terms of violating the platform’s rules. If an ordinary person had posted that, it would take just one report from a user to cause the post to be removed. Instead, it was flagged for management review, and Zuckerberg himself intervened to keep the post up.

The lesson of “The Facebook Files” is that the company cannot be trusted to regulate itself. There’s no need for further arguments about whether Facebook has a deleterious effect: The company’s own research says it does. Facebook is thus in the same position as tobacco companies that knew smoking causes cancer, or oil companies long aware that fossil fuel consumption is driving climate change.

The political question now is what form that reorganization should take. Should the various internal remedies proposed by Facebook researchers be mandated? Should Facebook, as Elizabeth Warren advocates, be broken up into smaller companies? Or would a more radical proposal to socialize Facebook and run it as a public utility, freeing it from the imperatives of economic growth so that it works only to foster communication, be the best approach?"

 more in the article

By Jeet Heer

The Nation