Divide And Conquer

Turns out the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie Social Media wasn't the plucky entrepreneurial good guy supernerd after all.

I think maybe the writers and producers had that suspicion all along.

WaPo, Yaël Eisenstat:

I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.

In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.

A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.

I'm good with the argument that we don't want a private sector entity deciding questions of free speech - that's not really what we're talking about - but I get the argument.

Coupla things:

• It's everybody's job - everybody's right, and everybody's obligation - to hold as many people as possible to account for telling the truth.
• There's a near-absolute expectation that advertisers don't get to put out false or misleading claims about their own products, or the products of their competitors.

Caveat Emptor applies, but only to a certain extent. So if (eg) your dealership has a car for sale that you advertise as a peach, when it's a lemon - you can expect a visit from the fraud unit.

You can be fined.

You can go to jail.

You can be barred from that industry.

Thing 3: No rights are absolute or unlimited. Speech is not just an expression of ideas - it's also an action. If your actions present a clear and present danger to others - as individuals or as a community - you can be (and should be) smacked down.

We've got to have a taste of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust Buster in the White House. Some of these companies have grown too big and too powerful.

It's not like we've never been here before