The article in the url below covers a lot of ground in a very short space. Ostensibly, the article is about Facebook – it's recent challenges and how it has responded in an effort to revive its reputation:
"Over the past several years we've learned a lot about the unintended consequences of social media. Platforms intended to bring us closer together make us angrier and more isolated. Platforms aimed at democratizing speech empower demagogues. Platforms celebrating community violate our privacy in ways we scarcely realize and serve as conduits for deceptions hiding in plain sight."
At a deeper level, however, the article is about the extent to which Facebook's response is deceitful and whether it is wise for us to outsource definitions of acceptable speech online to a for-profit firm with little regulatory oversight. This article, in particular, was prompted after Facebook announced it is now in favor of protecting privacy and, as one of its first steps, decided to ban Alex Jones (and a couple of other equally offensive commentators) from its site:
"The issue isn't whether the people in question deserve censure. They do. Or that the forms of speech in which they traffic have redeeming qualities. They don't. Nor is the issue that Facebook has a moral duty to protect the free-speech rights of Farrakhan, Jones and their cohorts. It doesn't. … The issue is much simpler: Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg and the other young lords of Silicon Valley to be good stewards of the world's digital speech?"
The author argues that, however well-intentioned, Zuckerberg and his colleagues at Facebook do not have the training, let along the moral authority, to be making these decisions on behalf of society:
"The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly."
Given its track-record in terms of meeting its promises so far, the author accuses Facebook of disingenuous attempts to manage its reputation while it works out how to monetize privacy. Ultimately, by making more things private, Facebook will be encouraging worse behavior (since criminals also like privacy), while pushing ever-greater responsibility on the firm to determine what is allowed on its site. The trouble is that, because more of these decisions will be taken behind closed doors, there will be even less scrutiny:
"Facebook has training documents governing hate speech, and is now set to deploy the latest generation of artificial intelligence to detect it. But the decision to absolutely ban certain individuals will always be a human one. It will inevitably be subjective. And as these things generally go, it will wind up leading to bans on people whose views are hateful mainly in the eyes of those doing the banning."
The point about censorship, of course is that, ultimately, it favors the status quo. The line between morally offensive speech and ideas that challenge current taken-for-granted norms can be fuzzy. The point the author makes is that we shouldn't be leaving it to Facebook to define the line for us:
"Facebook probably can't imagine that its elaborate systems and processes would lead to perverse results. And not everything needs to be a slippery slope. Then again, a company that once wanted to make the world more open and connected now wants to make it more private. In time it might also become a place where only nice thoughts are allowed. The laws of unintended consequence can't rule it out."
Ultimately, Facebook cannot win. If it pursues an open policy, where all speech is ok, it will play host to some extremely offensive images, events, and positions. But, if it starts enforcing ever-stringent rules that it makes internally, it will be open to accusations of playing God and determining what constitutes the limits of free speech online. And, since Facebook counts its users in the billions, its rules will be the rules for the internet.
Take care
David
David Chandler
© Sage Publications, 2020
Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler5e
Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
Facebook's Unintended Consequences
By Bret Stephens
May 4, 2019
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
A19
