Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Want To Censor Politicians, He Wants To Censor Users
This has been quite a week for everyone’s favorite lifeless-eyed big tech CEO. First he got into it with Elizabeth Warren over whether or not politicians should be able to publish ads that contain lies, and now this. I’m glad to see that Washington is starting to recognize what an enormous enemy of democracy Facebook truly is.
In an interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, he was asked a question about the disagreement between Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris during the fourth Democratic debate over whether Donald Trump’s Twitter account should be suspended. Zuckerberg responded by saying “my belief is that in a democracy, I don’t think that we want private companies censoring politicians in the news.” Of course he doesn’t want to censor what politicians say in their ads. The more ads they sell, the more money they make. The more sensational those ads are, the more engagement they deliver, and thus, the more money Facebook makes.
No, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to censor politicians, in fact, he wants them to publish the most ridiculous ads possible. Then he’ll just censor all the people talking about those politicians to effectively gerrymander opinions, enabling companies like Cambridge Analytica to publish their own sensational ads (which are personally targeted to undecided voters, whose information they’ve collected and analyzed without consent), effectively allowing them to sell out major elections to the highest bidder.
He’s trying to pass this off as a free speech issue, to seem like he’s making the tough decision now that will seem like the right one in the long run. He cites his confidence in people as a reason that the truth will prevail despite this inconvenient but necessary decision to allow the erosion of truth in our society. Fortunately, I’m not the only one seeing through Zuckerberg’s bullshit here; CNBC’s Steve Kovach had a similar take:
While there’s almost no human involvement in deciding what to pump into your Facebook feed, there is an algorithm that’s making those decisions. In general, that algorithm is designed to keep users sucked in, and the best way to do that is showing them stuff that will engage, enrage or feed their biases. Truth doesn’t matter to an algorithm. But when you’re delivering news and information at a massive scale, you also carry the responsibility to get it right. Facebook is doing that on a scale never seen before in human history. And its leader admitted on Thursday that it wants no part in playing the role of fact-checker. In fact, in the case of false political advertisements, it’s willing to get paid to spread those falsehoods.
History won’t look fondly upon that.
See also: this.