This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for governments worldwide to issue “more guidance and regulation” on what speech should be permitted on social media platforms.
These comments are a giant red flag, and we all ought to be wary of government intervention in a free and open internet. But we should also see Zuckerberg’s comments for what they really are: corrupt, cronyist calls for regulation that would protect tech incumbents, such as Facebook, from new startups and competition. Of course, the CEO’s support for the government controlling discourse in the public sphere stems from the fact that the biggest industry incumbents are best equipped to bear the costs of new heavy regulation.
.@Facebook‘s Zuckerberg requests government “guidance and regulation” on “what discourse should be allowed,” on the platform.
“It’s about coming up with an answer that society feels is legitimate and that they can get behind.”https://t.co/PXOzSmQjs5
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) February 16, 2020
“It’s about coming up with an answer that society feels is legitimate and that they can get behind and understand that you drew the line here on the balance of free expression and safety,” Zuckerberg said. “People need to feel like, ‘OK, enough people weighed in, and that’s why the answer should be this.'”
There are many flaws with this line of thinking.
When governments pass laws to regulate speech, it isn’t society which dictates them — it’s the politicians in charge and, inevitably, the partisan interests they represent. Just consider the blatantly partisan slants to various prominent politicians’ calls for stricter social media regulation.
On the one hand, Republicans such as Sen. Josh Hawley have called for Facebook to be punished for perceived censorship of conservative views. On the other hand, Democrats such as presidential candidate Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have called for them to be punished for not censoring enough “fake news” — while citing only conservative content as examples.
Zuckerberg has it all backward. Majority consent is not what free speech and individual rights are about. If anything, these rights are meant to protect us from the tyranny of the majority.
Our society doesn’t value these rights because the majority currently supports them. If anything, they’re enshrined in the Constitution precisely because they protect minority views from having their rights violated by a majority. If free speech is restricted based on “enough people” “weighing in,” then it isn’t free speech at all. It’s merely an excuse to quash dissent while undermining our liberal democracy — under the pretext of shielding a hapless public from the “wrong” speech, as defined by political actors of the time.
When YouTube and Twitter responded to pressure from governments to censor “violent content,” journalists exposing human rights abuse by governments such as Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas lost their accounts. Even if we trust governments to provide exceptions for such cases, and they certainly might not have an interest in doing so, that clearly isn’t good enough. Hundreds of thousands of posts flood these sites, and it’s simply impractical to vet each one accurately. That’s why even private regulation such as Facebook’s “Community Guidelines” are not consistently enforced.
Even attempts by sites to vet “fake” content through supposedly “independent” fact-checkers have produced biased outcomes.
And it will only be large players such as Facebook and Google, the ones who control the platforms where much of our discourse currently takes place, who can weather the impact of these laws. Not only are they the only ones who can afford to hire large international teams of content moderators capable of responding quickly enough to infractions, they’re also the only ones who can afford the costs of protracted litigation when dragged before courts for mistakes on their part.
Meanwhile, smaller players or startups are likely to struggle or fold. This is the last thing we need in an industry where the Big Tech players, now trying to act in cahoots with world governments, already exercise so much control.
Satya Marar (@MisterJEET) is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
