Ilhan Omar has called Facebook “a willing agent of the GOP,” declaring that “our democracy is their target.”
Democrats like Omar, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are upset with Facebook for a bunch of reasons. For one thing, Facebook policing of political advertisements is not aggressive enough for these Democrats. Also, AOC is really upset that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sometimes dines with conservatives.
I was at one of these dinners. I know a handful of Facebook employees, and I had written that perhaps Facebook ought to be broken up. So I wasn’t shocked that I got invited. Zuckerberg fed us dinner, as I disclosed at the time, but he didn’t cover my travel or lodging.
Contrary to what AOC has suggested, we never discussed whether “White Supremacy is a hoax.” (I assume she means whether the existence of white supremacists is a hoax, but we discussed neither.) The dinner was off the record, and bound by that agreement, I won’t share who else attended or what they said. But I generally consider my own attendance at events where I speak to be “on the record,” and what I say at those events to be on the record.
So here’s roughly what I said: Facebook is attempting the impossible. The company is trying to create a single set of norms — on permissible bounds of opinion and on fact-vs-error — in a society whose shared foundation of values and even of objective truth is too shallow to support such a creation.
And the demands Democrats are making on Facebook are even more clearly impossible. The norms and rules of American society are changing incredibly fast and unevenly across the population. The definition of marriage held by the last Democrat elected president is today decried as bigotry.
And there’s a bigger problem: The U.S. is just too big and too diverse to fit into one set of rules.
Facebook doesn’t tolerate all content. For instance, terrorist propaganda is barred. The company also bans some hate speech from its platform. And so Facebook needs a standard to decide what sort of content is too hateful or too evil to allow, and a process to adjudicate which content meets the threshold.
This isn’t simply a difficult task, I argued to Zuckerberg, but an impossible one. There is no standard of decency or boundary of permissible opinion held by our whole country. Today, beliefs held most dear by one-third of this country are seen as hate speech by another third.
Simply wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat is now seen as an act of violence in many corners. During the Obama years, it was declared racist to mention “golf” or even call Obamacare “Obamacare.”
The Catholic Church, many Protestants, and most if not all Muslims in America hold that marriage is only valid between a man and a woman. To articulate that view of marriage today is deemed as bigotry in most elite circles.
Major magazines and newspapers run obscene material constantly, including British news websites that populate their right-hand column with photos of mostly-naked women. This material, in the opinion of many conservatives and religious folk (as well as some left-wing feminists), is not fit for public display. Should Facebook bar Daily Mail articles, Playboy articles, and obnoxious bits of anti-Christian bigotry?
Hate speech isn’t the only area of great dispute. We, as a nation, can’t even agree on what is true, or what counts as a check-able fact.
The CNN chyron for much of October contained a bald assertion — unsupported by anything, as far as I can tell — that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong in taking a strangely lucrative gig with a Ukrainian oil company while his father was vice president. If CNN’s journalists consider that dubious opinion a “fact,” then anyone is going to have trouble doing the sort of fact-checking that would be required to ensure no “misinformation” ends up on Facebook.
It is crystal clear to me that a child in her mother’s womb is a human baby and that it is violence to kill her. That’s denied by half the country.
As a country, we can’t even agree that men do not get pregnant.
Even before the radical changes in the culture wars in recent years, Facebook’s project would have been impossible because it is trying something too big. I have said the same thing to Facebook staff at their D.C. offices, and to Google officials at a D.C. salon dinner. Facebook is trying to be a salon for the whole world. Every salon, pub, book club, library story hour, and workplace in the world has rules and norms. Many places have different norms from other places. Some language acceptable at my local pub is not okay at my local parish. What’s rude in Atlanta is ordinary in New York.
We deal with our differences by having different norms and rules in different places. But Facebook, like Google and Twitter, have built these giant, global places. There’s no one set of rules we can all agree on and it’s folly to try to create one.
