What Is Mark Zuckerberg Thinking?

It’s quite possible that when Mark Zuckerberg, as a sophomore at Harvard, sat pining in his dorm room in the early 2000s, he really wasn’t thinking about much more than getting a date when he created Facemash, the first iteration of Facebook. Today, far more than a “hot or not” picture gallery site for college students, Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world, and, with 2.5 billion users, it commands serious attention. Its business model depends on people connecting with one another and sharing information – whether or not that information is true. In fact, the less true, the more incendiary, and the more salacious the stories are, the more eyeballs, the more advertising revenue. This means that, in a very real way, Facebook depends on disseminating untrue information. This has caused a lot of damage for a lot of people over the years; even more damaging, it has the makings of destroying long-established norms underpinning our democracy. Opinions can be all over the place – differing opinions are a hallmark of American life – but a site with so many people tuning in ought to at least try to ensure the facts it publishes are true and to at least try to ban factual lies.

Yet Zuckerberg told Fox News last week, “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” Although that sounds honorable enough, he willfully ignores an elephantine reality: Facebook exerts influence, and plenty of it. By honoring free speech so absolutely, he is endangering the body politic, the idea, of America. Bear in mind, by the way, that free speech is a First Amendment protection from the government, not a mandate for private entities like Facebook. Or Twitter.

This has become a hot topic because of criticism President Trump has received relating to several of his Twitter messages. That he sends controversial, even incendiary, tweets is nothing new, but the explosive combination of the coronavirus pandemic, the country’s resulting stunning economic injuries, and the gut-wrenching civil unrest of recent days has accelerated Trump’s tendency to tap out untruths. Last week Twitter appended one misleading message with a fact-check label and a link to a more accurate story (the topic was mail-in ballots) and, for a separate reason, hid another (the topic was violence). After agonizing for two years about exceptions for Trump and other politicians, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, finally decided that even the president must follow its rules. Enough was enough.

Zuckerberg sees things differently. “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up,” he wrote on Facebook two days ago, “but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.” 

His use of the phrase imminent risk of specific harms or dangers is both weaselly and cowardly. The reality is that falsehoods are spread around the nation to millions in nanoseconds and many people believe them. That the harm is not specific or might not be imminent is hardly the point. Much real harm is being done in the name of not arbitrating truth. Zuckerberg wants the economic benefit from his billions of customers – he’s worth almost $80 billion – but none of the responsibility for the damage his company does.

Several of Facebook’s own employees have become so disgusted about this that they have left the company. The New York Times reported this today: “I am proud to announce that as of the end of today, I am no longer a Facebook employee,” tweeted Owen Anderson, who was an engineering manager at the company for two years. “To be clear, this was in the works for a while. But after last week, I am happy to no longer support policies and values I vehemently disagree with.” But he wasn't alone. “Today, I submitted my resignation to Facebook,” Timothy J. Aveni, a software engineer who'd been at the company for a year, wrote on LinkedIn and on his Facebook page. “I cannot stand by Facebook’s continued refusal to act on the president’s bigoted messages aimed at radicalizing the American public. I’m scared for my country, and I’m watching my company do nothing to challenge the increasingly dangerous status quo.” Indeed.

Before entering Harvard, Zuckerberg was a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, whose Deed of Gift from John Phillips in 1781 included this, at once an ideal as well as an admonition: “Goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.” Zuckerberg is uber-smart, no doubt, with likely more knowledge gained in his 36 years than most who die at twice that age - and his and his wife's charitable work is worthy of much praise - but, as he occupies a unique position of influence, he would be wise to think about the good he visits, or doesn’t, on American democracy. Even though he’s not breaking any laws, and he has the right to set policies as he sees fit, he still has an ethical obligation to understand the damage Facebook can do, and to do something about it other than rely on what are basically a few clichés about free speech.