On May 15, Facebook released its first-ever “Community Standards Enforcement Report.” Despite its numbingly bureaucratic title, the report contains startling details about the scope of the challenge facing the company as it tries to monitor violent, extremist, and false content on its platform; Facebook has tagged and taken down millions of instances of such content in just the past few months.
In a note on the report’s release, Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics, wrote, “We built Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss different ideas, even ideas that some people may find controversial or offensive. But we also want to make sure our service is safe for everyone. Sometimes that is a hard balance to strike.”
Evidently. While Facebook is patting itself on the back for slaying trolls and challenging fake news in the United States, the company, along with Google, is waging a different kind of content war in Ireland, one that has exposed both tech giants to charges of viewpoint discrimination.
In the lead-up to a constitutional referendum on abortion in Ireland on May 25, Facebook announced that it would stop accepting ads purchased by organizations outside of the country. “We understand the sensitivity of this campaign and will be working hard to ensure neutrality at all stages,” a Facebook statement read. “Our goal is simple: to help ensure a free, fair and transparent vote on this important issue.” Google announced an even broader ban: The company won’t allow any advertising related to the referendum on any of its platforms, including YouTube, either from Irish or non-Irish sources.
These strategies are notable not only because they have never been tried before, but because they presumably go against the financial interests of both companies (together, Facebook and Google control approximately 73 percent of the online advertising business in the United States and even more than that globally). Is Big Tech finally putting principles before profit?
Not quite.
Both Facebook and Google made sure to mention their commitment to election “integrity” and “transparency” when asked about the ad bans in Ireland, no doubt as part of a larger public relations effort that will help them emerge from the defensive crouch Big Tech has been in since revelations of massive privacy breaches and Russian election meddling.
But even if we take both companies at their word and accept that the ad bans are motivated by principle, in practice they will have the effect of silencing only one side of the debate: the pro-life side. It was largely pro-life groups from America, Canada, and the U.K. that were buying ads on these platforms, and tightening poll numbers suggest they were having success spreading their message online. As the Irish Times reported,
Representatives from several of the Irish groups that support the No campaign told the paper,
The timing of the Big Tech ban is also suspicious; the No campaign had already purchased tens of thousands of dollars of ads that they were ready to roll out in the final weeks of the campaign. Why would tech companies call a halt at this point, in the name of a vaguely defined “neutrality”?
Seen from one perspective, Big Tech’s Irish policy looks like another chapter in the ongoing story of Silicon Valley’s political bias against conservatives and conservative ideas. Recall Twitter’s launch in 2016 of its much ballyhooed “Trust and Safety Council,” which was supposed to help monitor the platform for bullying and extremism. The company was appropriately criticized for stacking the council with left-leaning groups. And Google continues to wrestle with perceptions (and lawsuits) based on its treatment of former employee James Damore, who was fired for writing a politically incorrect memo about the company’s diversity-driven hiring practices.
But the ad ban in Ireland is a signal of something worse than mere political bias. It points to a broader and more worrisome ethical cluelessness among the leaders of Big Tech.
There have been hints of this before, such as when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought it would be a swell idea to model the features of the company’s new Virtual Reality technology by having his VR avatar “hang out” amid the hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico. More recently, Google’s unveiling of Duplex, part of its artificial-intelligence-fueled voice assistant technology, wowed an audience of developers who watched it trick gullible humans into believing they were talking to another human being rather than a bit of code. Non-Silicon Valley types, by contrast, were aghast that Google would celebrate a design whose intention is clearly to deceive.
It’s not just critics on the right who are unhappy with Big Tech’s apparent lack of a moral compass. This spring, approximately 4,000 Google employees signed a letter protesting Project Maven, Google’s technology initiative with the Defense Department that seeks to improve the Pentagon’s drone surveillance program. Google is trying to land other Pentagon contracts worth around $10 billion, but many Google employees don’t want to work for a company that is potentially in the business of making autonomous weapons. Google is reportedly now drafting “ethical principles” for future projects, to which one might reasonably respond: Why hasn’t it been operating with ethical principles until now? And since ethics are an afterthought with its AI research, why should the public trust the claims Facebook and Google are making about their supposedly transparent decision-making processes regarding ad sales in Ireland?
Companies like Facebook and Google aren’t nation-states or special interest groups, but as the Irish referendum suggests, sometimes they are too eager to act like both—and there’s little anyone can do about it. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, it has at least prompted greater scrutiny of Big Tech’s ethics—or lack thereof—when it comes to some of the most polarizing political debates. And it’s given the public yet another useful reminder that our tech giants aren’t morally neutral. When it comes to Big Tech’s business practices, caveat emptor.
