Zuckerberg’s View of Speech on Facebook Is Stuck in 2004

Three days after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. “The idea that fake news … influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said. The line has been reprinted so frequently, many can cite it from memory.

It didn’t matter whether his comments were willful or accidental. The world asked, “How could someone so rich and powerful be so out of touch, and not appreciate the impact Facebook had on the election?” And Zuckerberg didn’t have a good answer. He and Facebook have been scrambling to repair their reputations ever since.

For a while, it looked like they would never figure it out. Russia’s manipulation of News Feed made them look negligent. The Cambridge Analytica scandal made them look reckless and greedy. But Zuckerberg kept pledging to spend as much as it took to make things right. He said he understood that Facebook needed to exert more oversight over what appears on its platform. And by the beginning of 2019, it was starting to look like he was getting traction—that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger were becoming safer, more responsible platforms for their users.

That hope took a body blow in the past two weeks. In his recent appearances, Zuckerberg doesn’t sound like a changed man at all. In a speech at Georgetown, his testimony to Congress, and his insistence that Facebook will allow politicians to run false ads, Zuckerberg has reignited the fights that followed Trump’s election. At the end of 2016, we worried about how Facebook had become a cesspool of lies, bigotry, and hate, skewing election results in pursuit of profits. We’re having the same conversation today.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is still lecturing us with the sophistication of a college student about the importance of free speech in politics. And he’s showing up in public forums like Congress woefully unprepared—or unwilling—to answer the obvious questions about those views. Why couldn’t he answer the simplest questions about his position on false ads from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week? It wasn’t a trick question. It was the same question that had been in the news for two weeks before Zuckerberg appeared in Congress.

Zuckerberg is still pushing the utopian view about news and information as when he started Facebook 15 years ago: Voters and citizens can figure out for themselves what is true and what is false. They can distinguish between a news story and an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, or a screed in Breitbart versus a news story in The New York Times. Society has much bigger problems when mainstream media has control of the conversation, he believes.

Read the transcript of Zuckerberg’s recent speech at Georgetown—or his appearance just after the election three years ago, or a decade ago—and they all make the same point: “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,” he said at Georgetown on October 17.

That may have sounded grand a decade ago when Facebook was a scrappy startup trying to knock Google from its perch. The “important consequences” included revolutions like the Arab Spring. But Zuckerberg isn’t leading a revolution against “the man” anymore. He is “the man.”

Twitter boss Jack Dorsey noticed that Zuckerberg is still clinging to his old tropes and took full advantage of his rival’s absolutist views. Just as Facebook began its earnings call with investors Wednesday, Dorsey said Twitter would, effective November 22, ban political advertising.

Dorsey has also taken a lot of heat in the past three years for his platform’s role in promoting disinformation in politics and in life. In the face of criticism, he’s consistently demurred, maddeningly projecting the image of an inscrutable philosopher, too far removed to see what was going on.

But he looked like a bona fide statesman Wednesday next to Zuckerberg. “This isn’t about free expression,” Dorsey said. “This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”

Twitter isn’t a big enough player in political advertising for this to affect Dorsey’s bottom line. And, no, it doesn’t tackle the cesspool of bots and trolls churning out lies and hate for free on the platform. But it forced Zuckerberg to respond on his earnings call, saying “At times of social tension there has often been an urge to pull back on free expression … We will be best served over the long term by resisting this urge and defending free expression.”

The irony is that Facebook is limiting free expression on its platforms. It has hired tens of thousands of people and spent billions of dollars in the past three years to effectively create a constitution for its 2.5 billion users. There are now detailed rules for what nudity is OK, what’s mouthing off, and what constitutes a real threat of violence, which is banned. The instructions for moderating hate speech alone run more than 200 pages.

But on the issue of political speech—arguably the most important part of free expression—Zuckerberg remains an absolutist. His view is rooted in Facebook’s earliest days, when Zuckerberg liked to talk about his creation not as something new but as digitizing and speeding up something that had existed for all time—conversation.

The problem is that many people in democratic societies increasingly wonder if the political free-for-all is such a good idea anymore. Many now believe Zuckerberg’s position is like saying nuclear weapons are just more powerful explosives. By amplifying and speeding up political discourse, Zuckerberg has created something entirely new, and it needs to be viewed that way.

There are myriad speculations about what’s driving Zuckerberg’s absolutism. Is he trying to appease conservatives, who view Zuckerberg as another liberal media mogul out to get them? Or is he just trying to protect one of the sweetest deals a media company could ever hope for? Zuckerberg now gets to distribute and curate the news and information for more than 2.5 billion people—and make money from those eyeballs—with little risk of being held liable for the content. Lawyers at Facebook, and other traditional media companies, believe that protection is finite: Curate too much and Facebook might become responsible for the accuracy of every post on its platform.

Zuckerberg himself says he is making a simple moral choice. And maybe that’s true, since he’s been an absolutist on political speech since he started Facebook. The problem with that explanation is that it’s hard to believe any discussion about morality from a man who has profited so handsomely from it. Zuckerberg is worth $70 billion. Facebook itself is worth worth half a trillion dollars. That’s especially true given concerns that Zuckerberg and Facebook have wrongly skewed elections and helped dictators more easily oppress their citizens.

The “whys” may not ultimately matter. Fifteen years ago, Zuckerberg promised that the Facebook revolution would make the world more open and connected—a better place. People in Silicon Valley used to say that as if it were a given. It’s clearly not a given anymore. Many believe Facebook has made the world more angry and divided. It still makes money from advertisers in torrents. But fewer and fewer view it as particularly magical anymore, and more and more talk as if they could imagine a world without it.

Zuckerberg says he gets the complexity of the decisions he and Facebook must make. “The question is, where do you draw the line” between what you keep up and what you take down? he asked in his Georgetown speech.

The world doesn’t seem to like where Zuckerberg has drawn that line. But Zuckerberg has made it clear he isn’t going to change where he draws it. The only question now is whether someone forces that choice upon him.

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