Dear Mark (if I may):
Recently in a Fox News interview, you said that your company, Facebook, would not fact-check any of the President’s lies, as Twitter has begun to do. You said that, “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Many–likely many millions–of Facebook users are upset, even outraged, at your position, including many of your own employees, especially in the face of the President’s posts inciting law enforcement and other violence against the current nationwide protests of police murders of African-Americans. And it’s not only politicians’ speech that you are allowing to run rampant over the truth and divisiveness. Since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, Facebook and other social media have disseminated nonsensical conspiracy theories that Floyd is not dead, that the police assault on him was faked, and that George Soros was funding the protests around the nation.
Despite your partial efforts since the 2016 election to limit the spread of disinformation on Facebook, malicious actors–both foreign and home-grown–continue to use social media, including Facebook, to inflame racial, political and religious hate in the U.S., uses with the aim and effect of promoting domination and autocracy. You may agree that these aims and effects oppose the purposes that the Founders enshrined in the Constitution: “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, (and) insure domestic Tranquility.”
Mark, you are hardly innocent of the damage that your company is doing to our society (among others) with your hands-off approach to political speech. Rather, with your decisions to permit the unchecked statements of tribalism, lies and deception to continue, you have been a central source of the messages that inflame America.
In your defense quoted above, you use two important ideas: arbiter of truth, and private companies. Let’s consider these ideas in turn. The first suggests that there are no fixed truths in human history, that there are only debates about “truth” that require arbitration to resolve. If that’s the truth (irony unintended, but useful, I think), then your unstated assumption is correct: it is a problem to decide who gets to determine the “truth.” Those with the loudest voices? The most wealth? The greatest political power? The biggest weapons? Facebook?
But do you really believe this, Mark? I don’t think so. To take the most obvious example, the founder of Facebook surely believes in science and technology, and isn’t calling for an arbiter to settle even disagreements on ideas in those domains. Here there are truths–techniques–for establishing the facts of scientific and technical conclusions.
But how about society writ large? Do you wish to say that American society is a sort of sandcastle in the sky, a shimmering system based on nothing that transcends human time? That everything that matters is simply a matter of opinion? Again, I don’t think you would wish to claim this. Correct me if I am wrong, but I suspect that you know that there are stable truths, beyond reasonable disputing, and that these truths include both ideals and hard facts. I suspect that you know that justice is “more perfect” than injustice, that fairness is “more perfect” than unfairness, that democracy is “more perfect” than fascism, that union is “more perfect” than hateful division, that mutual respect and support are “more perfect” than domination and repression. And that you know what in fact constitutes these alternatives.
And I suspect that you’d agree that these transcendent truths, these large truths, are part of our common sense in America, as Americans. Despite the noise and misinformation so greatly amplified by social media, most Americans still have not lost sight of them. And that lies and hate messages undermine them are part of that same sense. Part of your common sense.
Your reference to “private companies” is also important. I take your argument to be that businesses built to make profits in the private sector should not undertake something so far from their expertise, and so important to the public good, as determining the flow of information and views in our vaunted political “marketplace of ideas.” There is no small irony here, Mark, and I think you realize your responsibility even as you seek to evade it.
Surely you do not mean to say that private social media companies should enjoy their market freedom to pursue profits by knowingly polluting our public “market” of political views with sheer malice and lies meant to create social conflict and even crimes against others. Certainly you do not mean to say that Facebook the Corporation bears no responsibility for the products it distributes. What other companies would you allow to claim that sort of freedom?
You may say that your product is merely a platform for communication, and that you are not a publisher with any responsibility for what others say on your platform. But what sort of distinction is this? No ideas or claims, no matter how virtuous or how vile, reach the public conversation without publishers, from print to traditional media to social media. By any reasonable assessment, Mark, Facebook IS a publisher of messages, the means of their transmission from individuals and groups to the larger public. And Facebook, for good or ill, spreads them with great efficiency. Like a virus.
Here is the good news about Facebook being a private company, Mark: Your policies are not limited by the First Amendment protection of free speech. You are not responsible for maintaining the “free market of ideas”–government bears that responsibility. You are free to publish or to censor any sorts of communication you like. But notice that even the First Amendment does not allow people to falsely yell “Fire!!!” in a crowded theater. Why would you wish to claim the liberty to publish incendiary lies, slander and misinformation in the tinderbox of inequality, injustice and racism that we inhabit today?
Corporations are a creation of law, and law–in the people’s name–permits their birth because they are believed to provide goods and services in the public interest. Because your lenient policies on political speech permit the dissemination of even the most obvious misrepresentations and incitements–especially those of the most powerful politician in the nation–they undermine not only the common sense notion of the public interest. Your policies threaten the very truths that Thomas Jefferson declared to be self-evident in the nation’s Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Mark, the American Dream opened up the possibilities that made your extraordinary career success possible. Please stop adding fuel to the fire that threatens to burn it down.
Peter Cleary Yeager, Citizen
