“Starting last Friday and building to a timed release on Monday, a collection of US and European news organizations began publishing waves of stories on a trove of messages, research, presentations and other internal documents, collectively called the Facebook Papers, that present internal concerns about the social network's responsibility to control dangerous content…
“The internal company files -- which run to tens of thousands of pages -- were collected by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who supplied the documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission before testifying at Congress earlier this month. Haugen's testimony followed shortly after an investigation into the files by The Wall Street Journal. On Monday, she testified before the UK Parliament.” CNET
The right argues that Facebook’s critics are biased against conservatives and making impossible demands of the company.
“When you set up a system where any user can register an account for free and start posting to his heart’s content, catching offensive, objectionable, or harmful content is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When the system grows so large that the number of users are in the billions, no administrator is going to be able to review, evaluate, and judge the appropriateness of [every] post of every user with any sense of speed…
“Spending a lot of time on social media may well have some unhealthy consequences. But it’s hard to believe that Facebook is some sort of unique societal menace, while Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the rest are just fine and dandy… What does seem to be a factor is that Facebook is the most popular social media network among older people — and older people tend to skew conservative and vote for Republicans, which suggests some of the ire directed towards Facebook is really an ire at the types of people most likely to be using it.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“The thousands of pages released so far contain zero signs of staff worries about (or even awareness of) left-wing hate speech and misinformation. Perhaps we’re only seeing part of the picture. But Facebook staffers’ incessant drive to censor right-wing stories and sites suggests they really are blind to the often-outrageous speech from outlets on the other side of the spectrum…
“Management did push back — but not because it worried its woke workforce was too comfortable with censorship. Higher-ups feared that targeting Trump-friendly outlets would earn it more ire — and perhaps regulation — from the administration then in charge. Not all higher-ups, though: In 2017, communications official Tucker Bounds said that in ‘a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.’”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“It’s possible that part of the pushback has more in common with moral panics of previous ages, like the fear that rock music or video games or Dungeons & Dragons were corrupting the young… We’ve heard a lot about Republicans trying to restrict people’s ability to vote and how the end of democracy is at hand because of it. We’ve heard comparatively little criticism about Democrats trying to restrict people’s ability to share content online.”
John Sexton, Hot Air
“If you break up Facebook and Instagram, is Facebook allowed to have photos on it? Is Facebook allowed to have its own messaging service? What are those barriers going to look like?…
“If we’d been having this conversation 15 or so years ago, we’d be talking about how MySpace is a natural monopoly, how Yahoo! won the search wars, and how nobody could ever catch Nokia. We have to think about that too every time someone claims this time is different. We currently have an objective standard when it comes to antitrust that’s able to look at the scenario and calculate whether consumers are being harmed. Before we consider changing an antitrust standard, we need to look at potential collateral consequences.”
Jennifer Huddleston, American Enterprise Institute
The left condemns Facebook for failing to police harmful content and calls for government oversight.
The left condemns Facebook for failing to police harmful content and calls for government oversight.
“According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai… In 2019, the human-rights group Avaaz found that Bengali Muslims in India’s Assam state were ‘facing an extraordinary chorus of abuse and hate’ on Facebook: Posts calling Muslims ‘pigs,’ ‘rapists,’ and ‘terrorists’ were shared tens of thousands of times and left on the platform…
“The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech… We ‘cannot be proud as a company,’ [one employee] wrote, ‘if we continue to let such barbarism flourish on our network.’”
Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic
“The Internet was created with an idealistic dream: The global propagation of open information would expand human freedom and democracy. As the world became flat and citizens were empowered, authoritarian rulers would become weaker. Alas, it hasn’t worked out that way. The paradox of the Internet is that it has enabled greater control by authoritarians and fueled greater disorder in open democracies…
“Congress should rewrite some of the rules that bound the Internet. For example, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be amended so that social media companies can be sued if they design algorithms that propagate false information. But total repeal of Section 230 would be a mistake, because it would encourage endless defamation litigation and discourage platforms from carrying true stories that are critical of the rich and powerful…
“Regulation of social media ultimately is on us — the users. We have to teach ourselves, our children and our ‘friends’ to monitor content and weed out what’s false and hateful. In the end, we’ll get the Internet we deserve.”
David Ignatius, Washington Post
“[The problem is] the underlying business model of Facebook, where you bring three billion people onto one network with no boundaries and no safety net, then combine that with a business model that's based on essentially promoting emotionally intense content in order to promote engagement, and then add into that the ability to target people with extreme precision. And the result is that an enormous number of ideas that have lived for years at the fringes of society — things like white supremacy and anti-vax — have suddenly been thrust into the mainstream and done huge damage…
“Almost every major problem we have going on in this country is made worse by Internet platforms like Facebook. And we have a need for something that looks like a Food and Drug Administration to ensure safety of tech products. We need to have privacy so that people are not manipulated by corporations that know absolutely everything about them.”
Roger McNamee, CNN
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