Facebook: Threat or Menace?
Do the Media Have a Stake in Curbing This Company?
By Richard Goldstein
Call me naive, but I’m not convinced that Facebook is a threat to democracy. Nor do I think that the incendiary effect of its algorithms are unique. They’re a juiced up version of a tactic that has existed in journalism ever since Joseph Pulitzer said that the purpose of a newspaper was to stimulate, not to enlighten. The question I want to raise is whether Facebook’s critics are reacting to a real danger or to an innovation that threatens their power and profits.
Few horrors short of pedophilia have united the left and right the way Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram have. Congress is awash in proposals to regulate these platforms, accused of sins comparable to the perfidy of tobacco executives who hid the evidence that their products were deadly. “A Big Tobacco moment,” is how one liberal Senator described the climate on Capitol Hill, and Republicans, who have long felt that Facebook is hostile to their base, are going with the flow. How did this company become the Great Satan? The answer, I propose, lies in a campaign led by old media to break up new media. This may be an example of public service journalism at this finest, or it may be a case of self-interest presenting itself as the common good.
After all, traditional media are subject to restrictions that internet platforms are not. The rules of streaming allow for copyrighted material to be shared online, raising the question of whether news feeds like Facebook’s drain revenue from other forms of communication. No reporter, as far as I know, has explored that issue, or considered whether envy rather than responsibility is stoking the jihad. No one has asked the crucial question cui bono? — who benefits if this company is broken up?
My suspicions are aroused because The New York Times, which is read by nearly all journalists and most politicians, has been waging war on Facebook for several years. Lately it’s made room for more balanced points of view, but if you run its coverage through a data base, you’ll find hundreds of critical articles in the paper of record over the past few years. Its chief tech writer, Kara Swisher, has mentioned Facebook 156 times, almost never favorably. No other media story has merited such consistently negative press.
One Times opinion writer calls Instagram “a cesspool” for teenage girls, because its algorithms flood them with unhealthy diet and beauty tips. Of course, influencers do the same thing, but the interactive quality of this platform is said to be addictive. A writer for The Atlantic calls Instagram “attention alcohol.” (I wonder what he would make of swipe-right dating sites.) The spread of addiction metaphors to activities that don’t involve substances is one sign of a panic; so is the image of a company hooking teenage girls on negative input for profit. The inability to control something that epitomizes danger is uniting some feminists and prohibitionists into a digital temperance movement.
Is this image based on fact? According to a whistleblower who produced internal company data, a third of girls who frequent Instagram report feeling worse about themselves. That sounds damning, until you think about the other 70 percent of girls on the platform. We haven’t heard from them, because the innocent victims of suspect entertainment always get the airtime. But it turns out that Facebook confined its survey to girls who had a bad self-image before they used Instagram; the company never polled girls who felt good about their bodies to begin with. So we may be dealing with a sample of vulnerable girls and extrapolating from their experience. There’s scant research on the impact of social media, but some of it has found only a small correlation between sites that push beauty tips and bad attitudes toward the body. In any case, teen angst has long sold more products than even the fear of germs.
There’s a sorry record of adults using licenses and codes to protect adolescents from the wrong kind of stimulation. I still recall the panics over horror comics (they lead to juvenile delinquency), rock n’ roll (a/k/a jungle music), and violent video games (a fomenter of mass shootings). Each of these shock-horrors led to intervention. We were once so convinced that gay literature was a threat to the young that we banned it from the mail. Yet, the belief that reality is shaped by representation persists. “The entire advertising community is dedicated to making women and girls feel inadequate,” writes one Times reader. “We have a lot more than Instagram to worry about.” When you suppress one source of offensive discourse and the problem still remains, you have to suppress something else. I would call that a suppression loop, and I think it’s as ominous as anything Instagram promotes.
But an anxious time prompts many people to project their feelings onto anything new and enigmatic, as social media seems to many adults. The reflex is to regulate what can’t be understood, and there’s no shortage of proposals to do that. Some activists want to see internet providers stripped of their exemption from libel laws, so that defamatory comments can be litigated. Others want apps to be rated, so teens can’t get their hands on the ones deemed bad for their mental health. Still others want those who post inflammatory content on social media to be identified, so they can be doxed. And there are those who want the Fairness Doctrine revived, so that a federal agency can preside over a limited spectrum of opinion. But the nature of the internet — diffuse, yet global — makes any attempt at suppression a game of whack-a-mole. You can break up Facebook and limit Instagram to adults, but there will always be a platform that publicizes the next radical leftwing theory, the next wave of teen vandalism, or the next Q-Anon.
The most serious charge against Facebook is that it incites its users by sending them more and more extreme info, keeping them glued to its news feeds. But TV networks and newspapers often hype stories that affirm our worst instincts. As the old saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” The most appealing tabloid trope is an event that affirms a stereotype, and it’s not hard to think of innocent people demonized by the appetite for rounding up the usual suspects. Can you say Central Park Five? That story spread across the media without the aid of an algorithm. Facebook has been blamed for causing the genocide in Myanmar, but the genocide in Rwanda was stoked by radio. Goebbels didn’t need Facebook to arouse the darkest impulses of the German people.
What has changed is not the strategy of social media, but the scale. Billions of people, along with hostile governments, have been empowered to hurl abuse or foster conspiracy theories. This democratization of information is scary, especially to those who struggle to report the news truthfully. I’m sympathetic, but that raises another question: Are the anxieties of journalists about challenges to their traditional role inflecting the media’s judgement when it comes to the peril of Facebook?
Consider Don Lemon, CNN’s most outspoken commentator. He’s been blasting Facebook on a nightly basis. Last week, he demanded that the platform be held to the same rules as his network. “Standards and practices,” he fumed. “What is put on your platform, at the very least, should be true.” Sounds reasonable — but, wait, there’s more. Social media allow Lemon to be insulted anonymously, and I’ll bet many of these taunts are racist and homophobic. Back when I was an openly gay journalist, my voicemail was full of nasty messages. If they threatened violence, I went to the police; otherwise, I took it, because I had visibility, while my critics had only their opinions. If Lemon doesn’t like the comments he receives, there are ways he can avoid seeing them. But he wants to track down his detractors. “If someone says something about me, I should know it’s Joe Smith who lives in Wisconsin and not just a bot,” he says. Identifying those who insult a pundit makes it riskier to be critical, and that may be Lemon’s point. He wants to be in the kitchen without taking the heat. And, guess what? Facebook seems ready to limit attacks on journalists. Reporters will be spared the vitriol that other public figures must face. Maybe now the press will spare Facebook.
I’m not saying that social media platforms are harmless. But the balance between safety and freedom has been skewed, because many people think that if the communication of bad ideas is regulated, the most ominous problems will be mitigated, if not solved. But those problems stem from real situations: gaps in wealth and education, geographic rivalries, racial tensions, and the destabilizing effects of migration. To curb the rhetoric of rage furthers the idea that an elite decides what can be seen and heard. What’s more, it’s futile in an open society. We’d have to employ the surveillance techniques of China to create a woke-friendly orthodoxy across the internet. Some liberals might find that a small price to pay for peace of mind. I’m not one of them.
Still, I think there are steps that can be taken to reduce the risks. There is talk in Congress of requiring Facebook to share its data with researchers, so that the true impact of its algorithms can be assessed. (If only that approach could apply to Exxon.) Facebook can add statements questioning the veracity of certain posts, as Wikipedia does. The platform can make it easier to shut off offensive comments. Links can direct viewers to less biased information, or even encourage debate. I realize that some of these things have been tried without much success, because people who are drawn to extreme speech will find it. No one who thinks the Covid vaccine contains a chip to control you will be mollified by the facts. I am old enough to remember when medical mistrust convinced a gay paper to call drugs that treat HIV “iatrogenic [medically induced] genocide.” Human beings, especially under stress, are subject to all sorts of bizarre beliefs, and it’s hard to imagine that this would be a calmer nation if provocative speech were censored.
Anyway, I have a feeling that these platforms are only the beginning of something truly disturbing. Brace yourself for the age of deep fakes, in which anyone with the requisite software can create simulacra that seem utterly real. Then what?
