Mark Zuckerberg still doesn't get it. Meta's billionaire owner announced this week that he would eliminate fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram in a move described as “re-prioritizing speech.” But with or without fact-checkers, Mr. Zuckerberg will still set the rules for what billions of people can see and say online every day. That's the real problem, and no amount of tinkering with his company's content moderation policies will solve it. Congressional action is needed instead.
Zuckerberg's move comes at a politically convenient time. Throughout the Biden administration, conservatives complained that social media companies were changing or enforcing content moderation policies to “censor” right-wing viewpoints. This complaint has now become the incoming administration's rallying cry, with President-elect Donald Trump vowing to “dismantle the censorship cartel.”
This narrative of platform “censorship” continues to be controversial. One reason is that what critics call censorship is: The Supreme Court said last yearthe exercise of platforms' own First Amendment rights to decide what kind of speech they want to promote. At least as far as the First Amendment is concerned, this is speech and, in other words, not censorship.
Still, it is true that platforms have often enforced policies to stifle legitimate political debate. There are countless examples to choose from. pro-palestine speech, LGBT content, Origins of the new coronavirus pandemicAnd, at least briefly, Hunter Biden's laptop story.
Although a platform's private decisions to remove or demote political posts are protected by the First Amendment, many say those decisions are censorious and dangerous to democracy. I understand what you believe.
In fact, theyteeth. But the reason doesn't seem to be quite what many commentators and Zuckerberg himself think. The problem is not that platforms have the power to suppress speech. The problem is that the platform's decision to do so is very important because of its size.
Even when small Internet forums adopt policies about the types of speeches they want to host, not many people notice. But when a platform with billions of users decides to tilt the discussion about its services in favor of some political point of view, that decision really matters. Because it can distort public debate and tear apart the fabric of representative government.
The point is that centralized power over speech, whether by government or private business, is dangerous. It leads to a kind of groupthink in our political thought and expression. And that creates a choke point in our conversations that we can use to quash dissent. Therefore, we should all be concerned that the power to decide what ideas gain support in our society is now concentrated in the hands of a few powerful billionaires. .
Mr. Zuckerberg's latest announcement seems to acknowledge this problem, but his proposal is not a solution to it. In a video published on Facebook, Zuckerberg said his social media platform would no longer rely on fact checkers to decide whether to remove or deprioritize false posts. Ta. The move would prevent “censorship” and reverse “mission creep that makes our rules too restrictive and easy to overenforce,” he said.
The problem with Zuckerberg's new policy is that it does nothing to address platform dominance. He will continue to decide who can join Facebook and Instagram and what they can say. And he is still the one who decides which posts to amplify and which ones to demote. Today, he decided to allow more political voice on his platform. But because I forgave less yesterday, I might change course again tomorrow.
It is important to understand that there is no “neutral” policy for speech on these platforms. Even if you believe that platforms should allow everyone to say whatever they want, someone needs to decide how to prioritize those posts in each user's news feed. And decisions about ordering are in many ways more important than decisions about what kind of speech to allow. Because it is what determines what content actually spreads on the platform, and it is also largely invisible to the public (and therefore has little accountability).
Unfortunately, the real solution to social media is not what Zuckerberg or any other tech CEO is likely to give us. We need to reduce their power over our speech, and proposals like Mr. Mehta's latest seem designed only to distract from that fact.
How can we reduce the power of platforms? We need regulation. For example, Congress could force platforms to become “interoperable,” allowing users of one platform to communicate with users of another. This allows users on Facebook, for example, to converse with users on other platforms and prevents the kind of lock-in that would cut businesses off from competition.
Congress could also enact privacy laws that would give users more control over their data and strengthen the Federal Trade Commission's authority to protect user privacy. Doing so makes it easier for users to bring their data to new platforms and makes it harder for platforms to accumulate that information in the first place. And Congress could pass transparency laws that would make it easier for journalists, researchers, and the general public to investigate platforms and expose any harm they cause.
These interventions won't solve all of your social media problems, but they will address the core problem of focus. These will enable the emergence of many smaller platforms and foster a more diverse and resilient social media ecosystem.
More platforms will lead to more experimentation with the rules of speech, rather than a relatively homogeneous set of amplification policies designed to make a few billionaires even richer. As the social media ecosystem becomes more diverse, it will be harder for governments to compel compliance. And smaller platforms will be better able to serve the needs of individual users.
To be sure, Zuckerberg and other platform owners may voluntarily implement some of these reforms themselves. They may decide to move their platform closer to Bluesky or Mastodon. Bluesky and Mastodon are already giving users more control over their online experience. But there is nothing about the past management of social media by the dominant platforms that suggests we should hold our breath any longer. As long as a few billionaires hold the reins of social media, we will continue to live in their world.
Alex Abdo is director of litigation at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute.
