Mark Zuckerberg’s calls for Congress to regulate Facebook are nothing new. But during a last-minute talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he subtly revealed his more sinister motivations.
The Facebook founder and CEO isn’t begging our government to tell him what to do out of obeisance, but rather out of a desire to shield his company from blame when it engages in speech policing. He hopes to consolidate the social media market into a crony capitalist cartel into which newcomers have little hope of entering.
In an unwise reveal, Zuckerberg exposed that before banning American pro-life posts targeting Irish voters in that nation’s recent abortion referendum, he asked the Irish government whether it wanted the tech giant to do so. Zuckerberg conceded that part of his rationale for increased regulation was that he felt uncomfortable making a decision for another government’s electorate.
Unless the ads posted by pro-life Americans prior to the referendum were factually dishonest or misrepresentative of their origins, Facebook’s ban was censorship, plain and simple. Based on archived versions of the ads, these weren’t government-hired trolls from a foreign adversary, claiming that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster. They ranged from mainstream and generic pro-life arguments to factual reminders that nations such as Iceland and Denmark kill every single baby with Down syndrome in the womb.
If Zuckerberg decides to ban dissent on his own, he cannot evade accusations of speech policing. If the government mandates it, he has a scapegoat. Furthermore, he also reiterated, perhaps a bit too often for his board’s comfort, that regulation would rock because then everyone would have to do it.
At upward of 2 billion users, Facebook controls more of the social media market than any other tech conglomerate on Earth. The only other company to come close is YouTube, followed by WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, and Instagram. Facebook owns all but one of those three, and no other company has more than 1 billion monthly active users.
But demographic trends don’t look great for the company. Young people prefer Snapchat over Facebook, and news is far more effectively shared on Twitter and even Reddit. It’s in Zuckerberg’s interest to consolidate the market and keep new competitors out.
Facebook can afford to keep 30,000 content moderators. Smaller companies and especially newer ones cannot afford to do anything like that. If the government imposes laborious requirements on social media firms, startups will cease to enter the market, and smaller companies will almost certainly bite the dust.
Make no mistake. Zuckerberg doesn’t want the government to break up his company — and slash his profit margins — and he certainly paid lip service to the importance of free speech as a guiding principle.
The “fundamental tradeoff,” Zuckerberg noted, is “between free expression on the one hand and safety, privacy, human dignity, and decency” on the other.
The question is how Zuckerberg wants the government to define that second category, and if his ruling on “human dignity” in the Ireland debacle is any indication, he’s already decided for whom and against whom the scales ought to tip.
