Category: Culture

The End of Fact-Checking at Facebook is Ideologically Consistent

fact-checking

The announcement that Meta will stop fact-checking material on its platforms is neither surprising nor, at this point, relevant. Mark Zuckerberg’s absurd announcement that the company is “getting back to core principles,” or whatever bullshit way he said it, is no more appalling today than that same rhetoric has been for decades. None of this conduct is news or purely about sucking up to Trump (though that is certainly a factor). Cyberlibertarian ideology, which is much older than Zuckerberg, has long relied on a rhetorical tactic by which Big Tech sells the public the idea that its business purposes enhance or support democratic principles while pursuing an agenda that is exclusively anti-democratic. And the public has a long history of falling for this shell game.

It is accurate but incomplete to say that when X or Facebook mothballs internal accountability this is motivated by profit. To be sure, Big Tech’s PR and lobbying assault on the very idea of regulation, whether by government or its own policies, is partly driven by the financial value of frictionless platforms. Thus, the tedious reiteration that we must “Save the internet!” from Policy X or Regulation Y, usually paired with alleged defenses of the speech right, have long masked the truth that allowing conspiracy theories, lies, hate speech, harassment, foreign propaganda, and material harmful to children is profitable. And like the NRA’s playbook, these harms are repackaged as the price we pay for a “free and open internet.”

So, yes, that message is motivated by money, but it is about more than money. Zuckerberg, in describing the decision to stop fact-checking as a move back to “core principles,” is merely fulfilling his destiny as a young cyberlibertarian, heir to a bizarre philosophy that is authoritarian at its core. Hence, the complaint that Meta does not care whether it harms democracy misses the trick that harm to democracy is the goal and not a byproduct. That harm will level up (though not to its zenith) on January 20th, when a felon will retake the Oath of Office he already violated while millions of citizens participate in an ersatz America brought to you by Silicon Valley’s new and improved democracy of the screen.

In nearly every article on this subject since 2012, I have tried to present variations on the theme that whatever policy matter may be the issue of the moment, Big Tech’s underlying opposition is not limited to the proposal itself but to the idea that government should even function as the instrument of democracy. No surprise that David Golumbia articulates this sleight of hand so clearly when he writes, “We seem to be talking about copyright, freedom of speech, or the ‘democratization’ of information or some technology. But if we listen closely, we hear a different conversation that questions our right and ability to govern ourselves.” That’s it in a bombshell. And although other industries (e.g., tobacco and fossil fuel) have adopted this same rhetoric, no industry has ever had so much power to control the message—let alone to argue that the messenger itself is the messiah of liberty.

While the traditional libertarian views democratic institutions as obstacles to liberty, the cyberlibertarian advocates digital technology as the workaround which obviates the need for those institutions. This, as stated many times, is the premise under which Big Tech’s anti-copyright agenda was sold to the public as a “right of access and speech” stifled by government’s authority to write copyright law. The access/speech narrative, which appeals in different forms to both right and left sensibilities, disguised the fact that Silicon Valley both objects to copyright enforcement as a business interest, but also to the principle that Congress should protect creators’ rights as an ideological matter.

Cyberliberatarianism, which guides (I would say infects) the minds of far too many tech leaders and tech industry evangelists, scorns the mechanisms of government as an inefficient and clunky way to run a society. And the profoundly unqualified Elon Musk, as the putative new head of “national efficiency,” is a manifestation of this same magical thinking. But who bought the bullshit? Who believed that digital technology can and should operate as the alternative to a functional representative government? Everyone. Left, right and center.

Yes, there are some prominent voices we can blame for carrying the cyberlibertarian flag, and these include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, Senator Wyden, Niskanen Center, Techdirt, Mike Masnick, Daphne Keller, Eric Goldman, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Cory Doctorow, Ed Snowden, Jonathan Band, Julian Assange, American Library Association, Brewster Kahle, John Perry Barlow, Eric Schmidt, the Cato Institute, and, at least in this context, the American Civil Liberties Union, to name a few representatives familiar to both liberals and conservatives.

Those parties, and far too many academics anointed with Silicon Valley oil, have all preached the cyberlibertarian gospel by advocating conveniently vague notions like “innovation” (appealing to conservatives) and “digital rights” (appealing to liberals). The former is a catch-all for the talking point that “regulation stifles innovation,” a thesis which never bothers to define either term. One need only watch the squabbles over AI to see this history repeating itself, with Big Tech arguing the deterministic importance of AI against any kind of statutory checks that might, for instance, bar the use of AI to exacerbate false information about real persons.

As for “digital rights,” if one wonders what distinguishes these rights from traditional civil rights, it’s a good question elided by the rhetoric of those who invented the term. That said, “digital rights” consistently include a presumed right to free and unfettered access to everything; a presumed right to remain anonymous under all circumstances; and the maximalist view that all material posted online, no matter how harmful, should be treated as protected speech. That these “rights” contradict the administration of civil rights everywhere other than cyberspace is an inconvenient truth that remains un-addressed.

In combination, these cyberlibertarian “core principles” add up to zero accountability for digital tech corporations promoting the illusion that their products foster greater accountability from the real enemy of liberty—democratic government. This is how I believe the ordinary imperfections of government became so much fuel for galloping conspiracy theories and preposterous narratives that rage across the web like a California wildfire. But if we vote as if the government is the enemy, then eventually it will be. And in this light, Meta’s announcement that it will shit-can accountability is not a pivot to the right, but a continuation of a long goose-step toward the far right that has been baked into that industry’s ideology for generations.

Assuming we will not all simultaneously cancel Facebook in protest, perhaps we can at least stop doing Big Tech’s bidding every time a policy proposal is made that the industry opposes. Whether the issue is Section 230 reform, artificial intelligence, countering mass piracy, image-based sexual abuse, child safety, etc., it might at least help if we reject any messaging promoted under that tiresome and disingenuous headline that we risk “losing the internet as we know it.” Facebook’s latest announcement is just another example that we can afford to take exactly that risk.

U.S. Copyright Law, Not Big Tech, Democratized Authorship

copyright law

Many copyright scholars refer to England’s Statute of Anne (1710) as the “first authors’ copyright law,” but I quarrel with that summary. In that year, and for many decades to follow, English “rights” for authors were too intertwined with the Crown’s authority to sanction publication of works for us to think of the Statute of Anne as affirming copyright rights as we understand them today. Although the administrative mechanisms of the Statute of Anne did inform the first U.S. Copyright Act of 1790, the “democratization” of authorship, which tech companies like to claim as incompatible with copyright law, was baked into American copyright as part of a novel Constitution expressing fundamental rights in a context to which no other nation on Earth could claim precedent.

Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8—the progress clause—is a declaration of hope, to echo a sentiment of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s. While most of the roughly three-million Americans were farmers with little formal education, the progress clause (or IP clause) expressed an ambition that America would eventually produce its own literature, scholarship, and invention. But significant distinctions between the new U.S. and England (and other parts of Europe) established American copyright law as egalitarian and democratic.

First, the government was not granted authority by the Constitution to sanction or deny publication. Second, the speech, press, and establishment clause exerted considerable force upholding the author’s right to express himself. And finally, the European tradition of art and science patronage by the nobility could not become dominant in either the economic or political composition of the young nation. For better or worse, even with its imperfections, professional authorship in the U.S. would be subject to the democracy of the market, and the copyright rights vested in the individual author were, and remain, the sole basis for a fair-trade relationship with that market.

Enter Big Tech and their big bullshit word “democratization.” They love this term because, like so many in its bag of rhetorical tricks, it sounds progressive, egalitarian, and even anti-corporatist, which is funny coming from the most powerful oligarchs since Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. They even claim to have democratized democracy, and indeed, they may well have democratized it all the way to authoritarianism. So, when Big Tech says “democratization,” it is always a grift, but it is still worth understanding how the rhetorical meaning has shifted in reference to authorship and creative work.

Distribution, Derivatives, & Data

Until generative AI changed the dialog in the last few years, the claim that “democratization” was antithetical to copyright tended to focus on attacking distribution rights or the derivative works right. Distribution rights, according to Big Tech, were only administered by “rent-seeking gatekeepers,” thereby rationalizing mass piracy followed by the arrogation of distribution to streaming platforms as new intermediaries. The result was platforms “democratizing” far more revenue out of creators’ pockets than the allegedly outdated models.

The other rhetorical use of “democratization” tended to focus on the alleged injustice of the copyright right of the author to prepare (or authorize) derivative works. This battle was fought in public over the proposed cultural value of “remix,” a pet project of Lawrence Lessig, and which fostered a lot of assumptions and misstatements in the blogosphere about fair use doctrine. That battle was settled, at least as a matter of law, with the outcome in AWF v. Goldsmith, which rescued the derivative works right from being swallowed by overbroad application of fair use.

On a more subtle level, Silicon Valley advocates also argued that digital modes of production are inherently easier and cheaper (neither of which is necessarily true) and, thus, it was argued that digital tech both “democratizes” production and justifies rethinking legal protection of the works produced. Likewise, anti-copyright academics, on behalf of Big Tech, have argued that unprecedented data-driven market analysis lowers the risk of production, which, again, supposedly demands rethinking the purpose and application of copyright law.

These and other variations on the theme that tech “democratizes” now coalesce and mutate around the argument that GAI is important because it “enables everyone to be a creator.” Hence, “gatekeeper” intermediaries like record labels are no longer the only “barriers to progress” because now, the professional creator who spent years perfecting her craft is accused of elitism for trying to protect the exclusivity of her art. This argument is absurd on its face because, of course, typing a few prompts into Suno to produce a guitar riff ain’t gonna make you Mark Knopfler. And in this sense, GAI is to creativity as the “democratization of information” is to expertise. Indeed, everyone using Midjourney can be a visual artist the same way that everyone using Google search can be an epidemiologist.

It is notable that “democratization” is the same con game, whether the subject is creative work or information because the constitutional purpose of copyright law was established to “promote science.” This is not to say that the Framers intended to exclude fiction or poetry or fine art from copyright law, but by any interpretation of the word “science” from the period, it is fair to say that the Framers hoped later generations of Americans would be creative and intelligent. And, yes, it was imagined and hoped that creative and intellectual contributions might one day come from any citizen. That was “democratization” circa 1790 whereas Big Tech’s application of that word, a euphemism for exploitation, has not been wholly beneficial for either democracy or intelligence or creativity.

eXodus: Bluer Skies for Social Media or Just a Short Breath of Fresh Air?

social media

As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal resources to supporting that campaign, the election was the final straw for many who fled to bluer skies.

Built as a “decentralized” platform, BlueSky takes an approach often advocated by Mike Masnick (who sits on the board) as a way to rescue the good of social media from the bad. But as I have argued for more than a decade, much of the harm caused by social media is too subtle to be designed out of the system. Even the best (or best-intended) social platforms are simply bad for democracy. BlueSky’s decentralized architecture may be more effective at weeding out haters and disinformation campaigns and providing users with greater control over what they see, block, etc., but this changes nothing about the reasons social platforms are fundamentally hazardous.

I am just about 50 pages into David Golumbia’s posthumously published magnum opus, Cyberliberatarianism:  The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, and one view David and I share is that social media’s organic harms to democratic institutions simply outweigh its benefits as a “social” forum. We discussed this in the podcast we recorded in October 2021 and generally agreed that there is no technological solution for many of the medium’s inherent pitfalls. My short list of those pitfalls includes the following:

Provocative Nonsense Isn’t Just a Joke

It is natural to post and share short-attention-span editorial material like memes. Some of the best educated people I know post this kind of content all the time, and once in a while, I like or share the ones I find funny or on point. But when the subjects of these micro-editorials are political and provocative, they are not wholly distinguishable from “Q drops” as fuel added to a fire. Perhaps the most dismaying example of this is the profusion of memes applauding, or at least winking at, Luigi Mangione for allegedly shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

A subject worthy of its own post (including a report that Mangione made a ghost gun ), the point worth summarizing in this post is that social media has eroded the moral barriers to political violence. Political violence is an inevitable biproduct of the erosion of democratic norms because a party’s destructive conduct (and indeed UH has blood on its hands) invites violence about which many will feel at least ambivalent, if not enthusiastic. Of course, as Dr. King warned, violence only multiplies violence, but as a novel feature of this vicious cycle, social media offers dopamine hits of provocative nonsense that allows even the observers of violence to laugh at, feel self-righteous about, or at least excuse conduct that should be rejected as a principle of functional democracy.

Aggregated Narcissism is the Ignorance of Crowds

Known formally as the Dunning-Kruger effect, microdoses of “information,” combined with the enticement to comment and share, feed that human frailty which allows us to pretend to know more about a particular subject than we do. Then, solidifying and amplifying our ignorance, social media provides “connection” to others who share the same uninformed belief. Thus, while many of us look aghast at the kind of unqualified nutjobs the next administration would tap for leadership of important departments, we must also acknowledge it is not Trump fans alone who have abandoned the notion of expertise concurrent with the growth of digital technology and social media.

Ignorance on topics ranging from vaccinations to NATO is just as deeply rooted in “progressive” politics as the right wing, and social media feeds the beast, partly due to the “IKEA Effect.” Akin to Dunning-Kruger, the IKEA Effect describes the satisfaction derived from completing a DIY project, only instead of assembling a desk without cracking any veneer, social media promotes and rewards the project of doing one’s own research, even to arrive at a conclusion that may be wholly untethered to reality. These psychological effects cannot be “programmed out” of the medium or countered with fact-checking. At best, they can be understood, much as my generation learned to understand the effects of watching too much television.

A Community of Frenemies is not a Community

“Jealousy” and “faction” are two words that appear with great frequency in the founders’ writings advocating adoption of the Constitution and creation of the United States. Whether the subject is election procedure, national defense, taxation, etc., The Federalist and other seminal writings all warn against faction as inherently destructive to common purpose, and out of that debate evolved the tradition of compromise and collaboration as necessary for keeping the Republic. But today, infighting among likely political allies is rampant thanks to social media, and it would be a mistake to believe that the mechanisms at work in the hostile takeover of the GOP are unique to the right-wing.

Although Golumbia presents an excellent case that Silicon Valley ideologies have always been grounded in right-wing, even fascistic, principles—and that bros like Zuckerberg and Musk have intentionally tilted the game in that direction—even “organic” interactions reveal that a prominent individual on the left will be attacked in a hate-storm if she critiques some unfounded position held by “progressives.” Thus, regardless of where people claim to sit on the political spectrum, one result of social media has been to scorn the idea of collaboration itself—a folly which has now become self-fulfilling prophecy because the reelection of an anti-democratic administration justifies the anti-collaborative spirit from which it drew power in the first place.

Disrupting the Purpose of Republicanism

Because social media amplifies and atomizes infighting, even the most dedicated and serious elected officials may find themselves in political jeopardy if they compromise or collaborate on the “wrong” issues. Representative government (republicanism) does not work well under 24-hour surveillance by the electorate—let alone an electorate animated by the Dunning-Kruger effect—or worse, professional trolls hired to attack the apostate the moment she steps out of line.

If one stammers at the upside-down world in which Liz Cheney is a “RINO,” social media made this alternate reality axiomatic by the same means that it became reasonable for so-called progressives to label President Obama a “warmonger.” The ordinary, even boring, job of governance has always operated behind the headlines of hot-topic issues. But due to the obligation to feed social media, nearly all politics are now performative, and the Member of Congress who does not entertain (i.e., does not deliver snappy comments on social media) may have a short and/or ineffective career.

No question that performance is always a part of politics, but social media enables more performative nonsense to flood the zone than was possible in the pre-digital era. Historically, a high-profile hearing, like a Senate confirmation hearing, would mainly be observed by the public through snippets and commentary edited by whichever news network we watched in the evenings. Meanwhile, low-profile hearings didn’t provide much opportunity to feed soundbites to constituents.

But speaking as someone who has watched a lot of back-burner hearings as part of his job, it is obvious that many are held for purely performative reasons because, of course, every Member has a social media person on staff who can make noise with a few provocative clips. That the substance of the hearing may be moot—or that most Americans won’t know it happened—doesn’t matter. The political value of the performance is enabled by social media, and this is a significant, and in my view negative, change to the nature of republicanism.

BlueSky is Nice but Can’t Fix the Problem

Yes, BlueSky is better (for now), and yes, I joined and started following people I believe to be thoughtful in their defenses of American democracy, etc. But the major adverse effects of social media cannot be eliminated either by design or the ethics of managers willing to keep hands off the algorithms. The affordances of the medium occur between the core technology and psychological responses to the experience—a thesis tragically supported by the fact that children can be coaxed into suicide by the material on their phones.

On that note, it will be interesting to see whether BlueSky supports platform accountability through legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), or a proper reading of Section 230, which was never meant to be blanket immunity for all providers hosting user content. Because ever since the so-called techlash of 2016, both the providers and their “digital rights” network have continued to push the narrative that somehow “restoring” the noble intent of the original internet should be the goal. But the original intent of the net’s first evangelists was not so noble (see Golumbia’s life work), and I think we all know Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Photo by: charlieblacker