A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Facebook Threat to Democracy-and Us All
On the hatred, violence, and lies that further enrich Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook presents so massive a threat to so many aspects of our lives,
it can be hard to imagine its scope, much less try to figure out what
might be done to disarm it. In The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance
notes that this
past summer, Facebook boasted fully 2.9 billion monthly active users
.
It has become, she notes, "effectively, a hostile foreign power,"
which is evident "in its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its
immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating
the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its
rulers' callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance
of American democracy." It is also "a lie-disseminating instrument
of civilizational collapse. It is designed for blunt-force emotional
reaction, reducing human interaction to the clicking of buttons

... Facebook executives have tolerated the promotion on their platform
of propaganda, terrorist recruitment, and genocide. They point to
democratic virtues like free speech to defend themselves, while
dismantling democracy itself
."

You may have already heard that, thanks to a trove of leaked internal
documents. The Wall Street Journal (unfortunately paywalled) has been
publishing a series of investigative articles that demonstrate how
dishonestly the company has defended its anti-democratic,
anti-humanitarian, anti-civilizational pursuit of profit. They are all
collected here
, but for a
short course, I've listed below just the headlines on the Journal's
stories, so you can see the extent of what might fairly be called
Facebook's "crimes against humanity."

* Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a
Secret Elite That's Exempt

* Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents
Show

* Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier
Instead

* Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The
Company's Response Is Weak, Documents Show

* Facebook's Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids,
Documents Show

Some background: The primary reason Facebook is so committed to
publishing lies is that, as the study discussed in this article

demonstrates, "misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks
than factual news during the 2020 election." It notes also
that-surprise, surprise-"right-leaning pages" produce more
misinformation than any other kind. For instance, we learn here that
"Facebook groups promoting ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment continue
to flourish
."

It's no wonder, then, that "to stir discord in 2016, Russians turned
most often to Facebook
."
Nor should we be at all surprised that when the company did its own
internal investigation, as this Times piece notes, "Facebook, fearing
public outcry, shelved earlier report on popular posts
."

Facebook also has no problem with the pursuit of mass violence if it
contributes to its profits. As Shira Ovide writes
,
"The company's most shameful human toll-its contribution to
violence, human trafficking and abuses by authoritarian
governments-has mostly happened in countries outside North America and
Western Europe like India, Honduras, Myanmar, Ethiopia and the
Philippines."

How does Facebook deal with the information that these crimes are taking
place? You guessed it; as this Journal piece explains
,
"Facebook ordered to release records on closed Myanmar accounts."
(Although in this case, a "federal judge rules social-media company
must hand over information about posts removed for promoting violence
against Rohingya Muslims"; allowing it to withhold them "would
compound the tragedy that has befallen the Rohingya.")

Another shocker: A group of scholars attempted to understand and explain
what was going on inside the company using the data it provides. They
then described the company's response
:
"We research misinformation on Facebook. It just disabled our
accounts."

The authors explained:
Our team at N.Y.U.'s Center for Cybersecurity has been studying
Facebook's platform for three years. Last year, we deployed a browser
extension we developed called Ad Observer that allows users to
voluntarily share information with us about ads that Facebook shows
them. It is this tool that has raised the ire of Facebook and that it
pointed to when it disabled our accounts. In the course of our overall
research, we've been able to demonstrate that extreme, unreliable news
sources get more engagement-that is, user interaction-on Facebook,
at the expense of accurate posts and reporting.

Is there a single individual who can be blamed for all this? you may
ask. Well, yes. As John Naughton notes in The Guardian
,
"Essentially, Facebook is a dictatorship entirely controlled by its
founder, Mark Zuckerberg. This total control is ensured by a two-tier
share ownership structure that gives him untrammeled power. The
company's regular regulatory filings

describe it thus: 'Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is
able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting
power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to
control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for
approval, including the election of directors and any merger,
consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets.'"

Is this individual an evil megalomaniac? is perhaps your next question.
Well, there is this: "Zuckerberg posts flag-waving video on electric
surfboard
."
Perhaps more significantly, there is also this: "No More Apologies:
Inside Facebook's Push to Defend Its Image
."

In that Times article, we learn that "Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's

chief executive, signed off last month on a new initiative code-named
Project Amplify. The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in
January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook's News Feed
,
the site's most important digital real estate, to show people positive
stories about the social network."

Where does that leave us? Well, apparently the most powerful media
platform in the world, a platform that has no prohibitions against
out-and-out lying and promoting violence for profit, is now also going
to be used specifically to promote itself, so that it might do even more
of the same. Let's hope no party-say, the Democrats-considers
nominating a politician who is not to Facebook's liking. Remember, for
instance, when Elizabeth Warren, who called for the breaking up of the
company, briefly appeared to be in the lead for the Dems' presidential
nod back in 2019. What was Zuckerberg's plan? "'We care about our
country and want to work with our government to do good things,'" he
said. "'But look, at the end of the day, if someone's going to try
to threaten something that existential
,
you go to the mat and you fight.'"

Oh, and hey, guess what? Thanks to AI, the misinformation problem at
Facebook is about to get a zillion times worse
.

LaFrance's Atlantic piece also quotes the late "political scientist
and historian Benedict Anderson [who] suggested that nations are defined
not by their borders but by imagination." I took just one class with
Anderson in college, but it made an enormous impression on me. I wrote a
sort of eulogy for him when he died in 2015, called "Remembering
Benedict Anderson
."

There, I recalled
one of the most exciting intellectual moments of my life: He invited me
to attend a faculty/graduate seminar where he sketched, in graphic form
on a whiteboard, the argument that would eventually become Imagined
Communities [the book LaFrance was quoting]. That short book, which has
since been translated into more than two dozen languages, is without
doubt the most influential work ever written on the origins of
nationalism. It has also turned out to be a significant work of media
studies. In it, Anderson considers Hegel's comparison of the ritual of
the morning paper to that of morning prayer: "Each communicant is well
aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously
by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident,
yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion." It is at least
partially through the "imagined community" of the daily newspaper,
Anderson explained, that nations are forged.

Seven years earlier, I wrote an essay in The New Yorker
about the
impending collapse of the newspaper industry, and there, too, I turned
to Anderson to help explain what it might mean for the country in the
future. And again, I quoted his line about how nations are "forged,"
as did LaFrance in her piece.

And as we now see, it is through Facebook and other irresponsible,
fascist-friendly media properties that they can also be destroyed.

Speaking of inspirational teachers, here
's a recording of a Kol Nidre/Yom Kippur
sermon on the meaning of race in America and its relationship to Judaism
from a rabbi in Dallas that begins, literally, with a description of an
American history class I took in high school in the academic year
1976-1977. All teachers are definitely not heroes, per Norm MacDonald
, but some sure are, and
I've been very lucky in that department (which, I suppose, is why I
became one).

I also published a piece in The Nation this week, comparing the
mainstream media coverage, and the lack of attention paid by the
foreign-policy establishment to Central America in general and to
Nicaragua in particular, to the obsessiveness shown back in the 1980s,
when the Red Menace reigned. It's called "Why the Media No Longer
Cares About Nicaragua
."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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