RIP, reality. We barely knew ye.
Meta’s decision to get out of the fact-checking business - announced this week by Mark Zuckerberg himself - is a move of expediency dressed up as virtue in the face of political necessity.
Zuckerberg and his creations might be Satan, but he’s not stupid. He can see fellow tech mogul Elon Musk reaping the benefits of ‘anything goes’ in the information space and has decided his company need not bear the burdens (or cost) of trying to moderate the firehose that is social media. There’s a reason the British Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg is out, and Republican Joel Kaplan is in as Meta’s global policy chief. Zuckerberg knows the organs he needs to service belong to radically different men now. Doddering Joe Biden is out; social media flamethrower Donald J. Trump is (back) in. Govern yourselves accordingly.
The simple truth is, Meta never wanted the responsibility of qualifying the content in sprays around its platforms. Content - all content - is merely a means to an end. Meta doesn’t care what we watch on Facebook or Instagram; all it cares about is the data we provide and how that can be most effectively sold to advertisers. All of the advisory councils or fact-checking teams are but window-dressing in the quest for ad bucks.
As Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former Head of Government, once put it to the BBC: “The company didn’t want to be, had no earthly idea how to even begin to think about determining what’s false or not”. This is because Meta/Facebook’s business model is based on the idea that it is not a publisher but a neutral platform. But the choice to level the playing field between a lie and/or an opinion and the truth and/or news that’s produced via a recognised editorial process is not a neutral act. It’s a decision to ‘flood the zone with sh*t’, to borrow a Steve Bannon phrase. Sh*t that rewards Facebook handsomely.
Some will say that Meta’s decision, while craven, is still correct. Big Tech, critics argue, should not be in the business of adjudicating speech. But this is to presume Western society’s strictures for speech scale to the imperatives of the 21st century. They don’t. Free speech is one thing; free reach is another. We celebrate the former, but have no plan for the latter.
All the more reason, then, for legislators to crack down on these awful platforms. We could easily regulate to produce platforms that promote speech without enabling reach in the quest for engagement and the ad dollars it brings. That we don’t means that it’s us who are squarely to blame for the informational chaos that now surrounds us, chaos that will now be getting infinitely worse now that Meta is out of the fact-checking game.
Comments