Facebook's astonishing indifference to democracy
Why does a company that knows it can harm democracy, that has seen it happen again and again, evince so little interest in fixing it?
In preparing the paperback version of Social Warming, I was given the chance to write a short extra introduction. It couldn’t be too long—no chapter-length stuff—but I jumped at the chance to include something more recent. The text of the hardback was set in stone towards the end of 2020, which meant that all the madness of the January 6 insurrection effort in the US Capitol (and the role of social media in fomenting it) happened too late.
There wouldn’t be enough room to add all that into the “Democracy” chapter of the book, but certainly would be in the extra intro.
I happened to notice that Katie Harbath, who features in the book as the Facebook executive remarking (a bit blithely, it seemed) that the Philippines in early 2016 had been “Patient Zero” for the use of the social network to distort election information, and perhaps the outcome, was no longer at Facebook. She popped up in a Wall Street Journal article in January 2022: “"Facebook’s former elections boss now questions social media’s impact on politics”. [That link should give free-to-read access.]
She says that when she resigned in March [2021], she had come to believe that unless there is urgent intervention from governments and tech platforms, social media will likely incubate future political violence like that of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I still believe social media has done more good than harm in politics, but it’s close,” she says. “Maybe it’s 52-48—and trending south.”
Ah yes, 52-48, which Britons know as the curséd ratio. So I got onto a chat with Harbath, whose thoughts form a chunk of the new introduction. The January 6 insurrection really spooked her, because the people being threatened by the mob were her friends and former colleagues from her previous life in politics.
Then came her hinge moment:
A restructuring in her department stripped her of much of her authority over election policy heading into 2020, she said, and the company rejected her proposal to refocus her work on heading off electoral threats before 2024, when a number of major global elections are scheduled.
There’s a whole chapter in Social Warming about the effect on democracy of social media (and particularly Facebook, because of its gigantic and pervasive reach, especially among older people who are more likely to vote). Sure: social media allows politicians to say things directly without going through “the filter” of the publishing media. However: it also allows and even passively encourages misrepresentation, exaggeration and misinformation, because those things are easy to create, attract a lot of attention (and thus algorithmic amplification, because the algorithm feeds on attention), and are difficult and time-consuming to correct. This is why publishing media, which tends to have lots of internal checks and balances, can actually be better in such situations. Sure, many outlets get caught up in the horse race of “who’s ahead in the polls?”, but the growing number of polls which try to find out what people are actually concerned about tends to feed into a better-informed narrative.
(Aside: at least, it could potentially feed into a better-informed narrative, but we seem to be still in the days where published media pays too much attention to “what’s trending on social media” rather than what more robust sources, such as representative polls, are telling them. Sure, in a 24-hour news world “what’s trending on Twitter” can be useful for a short-term hit, but it is not, and can never be, an indicator of what a nation is thinking. Perhaps in a year or two that will change.)
Harbath’s horror at the Capitol Insurrection was mirrored to some extent across Facebook. Frances Haugen’s leaked documents showed that some people inside the company worried afterwards that by letting the “Stop The Steal” result-denying groups spread because of “free speech”, they had helped foment the riots that saw multiple people die.
Those who died included an overexcited rioter who thought there would be no consequences for climbing through a broken window into a space where lawmakers were sheltering from said rioters, and was shot dead for her troubles. Speech has consequences, in ways we can’t predict. Facebook played a part in the Capitol insurrection. We can’t quantify exactly how much. But that doesn’t mean it was zero. In just the same way that when we have a heatwave in Europe, or excessive temperatures in India that approach the limits of human survivability, we can’t say exactly how much is due to the Earth’s mean temperature being 0.1ºC higher than some previous time, but we do know that the higher temperature raises the chance of it happening, we can’t say exactly how much social media and its amplification algorithms contribute to the spread of misinformation during elections (or in this case after them). But we do know it happens. It’s why I called the effect “social warming”. It’s diffuse, hard to pin down, pervasive. And it’s definitely there.
Which is why I groaned inwardly at the New York Times headline on Thursday: As Midterms Loom, Elections Are No Longer Top Priority for Meta C.E.O.
The top three paragraphs:
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, made securing the 2020 U.S. election a top priority. He met regularly with an election team, which included more than 300 people from across his company, to prevent misinformation from spreading on the social network. He asked civil rights leaders for advice on upholding voter rights.
The core election team at Facebook, which was renamed Meta last year, has since been dispersed. Roughly 60 people are now focused primarily on elections, while others split their time on other projects. They meet with another executive, not Mr. Zuckerberg. And the chief executive has not talked recently with civil rights groups, even as some have asked him to pay more attention to the midterm elections in November.
Safeguarding elections is no longer Mr. Zuckerberg’s top concern, said four Meta employees with knowledge of the situation.
No longer Mr Zuckerberg’s top concern. So many of the people I spoke to and quoted in Social Warming were frustrated beyond belief by the indifference of Facebook in particular to its effect on elections and democracy. Twitter in November 2019 banned political adverts on the basis that they’re potentially influential in subversive ways. That link goes to a page with Jack Dorsey’s full thread on a page, but this individual tweets is worth considering:
But Facebook doesn’t subscribe to those thoughts. Zuckerberg’s argument is that Facebook lowers the cost to would-be politicians of reaching their would-be constituents, with better targeting than stuffing leaflets through doors. (Certainly the Leave campaign in the UK used Facebook incredibly effectively to motivate people who had never voted in their lives to go to a ballot box.)
The trouble is that such adverts can contain outright lies. Zuckerberg admitted as much in a Congressional hearing, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took him apart, in her inimitable manner:
Nothing’s changed. Zuckerberg, and thus Facebook, remains indifferent to the bad effects it has, and now just wants to go and play with his new toy—the metaverse, for which there’s been a whole company name change.
Harbath is unimpressed. “This shift to the metaverse, while there’s still all these other problems that we’re trying to deal with, just feels a little bit like ‘I don’t want to deal with this big mess I made, and I’m going to walk away and not do much.”
So the US midterms approach, and there’s a widespread feeling that the Democratic Party is going to get hammered. Will that be Facebook’s fault? Mostly no: the Biden administration looks, from across the Atlantic, completely enfeebled by a political system it is unwilling to confront. But when the misinformation keeps ramping up, is that down to Facebook? Certainly yes. The social temperature keeps going up, and Zuckerberg is dallying with letting you choose your designer attire in the metaverse. Perhaps there’s one for him with a toga and violin.
The paperback of Social Warming comes out in July, but you can still get the hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
Perhaps you or someone from Meta could recap the approximate dates when election security WAS Mr. Zuckerburg's top concern
"Mostly no: the Biden administration looks, from across the Atlantic, completely enfeebled by a political system it is unwilling to confront".
Should he abduct Joe Manchin and hold a gun to his head?
Seems to me, from across the Atlantic, that US corporate media are misrepresenting Biden and his achievements despite a non-majority.