Facebook Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday gave a passionate defense of how Facebook and the rest of the Internet are essential tools for the free expression that is essential in a healthy democracy. I agree with this in principle, as I imagine most Americans would.
The dark side of Facebook and the mass-market Internet is not necessarily the ideas behind them. It is how those principles can wittingly or unwittingly be subverted when principle meets reality.
The question is whether the good that comes from anything — Facebook, the automobile, electricity — outweighs the inevitable negative effects and whether it is possible to mitigate the latter, while accentuating the former.
Photo: Reuters
While I am glad that Zuckerberg is articulating his values and, by extension, those of the company that he controls with absolute authority, the principle of Facebook matters far less than what happens when lofty ideals collide with more than 2.4 billion people around the world using Facebook or its Messenger chat app. That number grows to more than 2.7 billion when you throw in WhatsApp and Instagram.
Zuckerberg used a speech at Georgetown University to argue for an optimistic view of the Internet. It was a good speech and worth watching.
He said the spread of prevalent Internet hangouts like Facebook is giving more people chances to be heard in ways that were not possible when, for example, a handful of rich people controlled printing presses or TV airwaves.
Over the long arc of history, Zuckerberg said, more speech from more kinds of people is healthy, within some reasonable limits like prohibiting the proverbial false cries of “fire” in a crowded theater.
How could anyone disagree with that? However, as always, the devil is in the details. Where people do not agree is what counts as shouting “fire” to cause a stampede of people.
And, more important, can Facebook at its scale effectively stamp out the truly harmful speech — terrorist propaganda, incidents of violence or incitements to violence, dangerous hoaxes — when there might be thousands of people falsely yelling out “fire” every minute?
Zuckerberg did not mention Myanmar in his speech, but to me it is the crucible of Facebook’s free-speech principles. In that country, people spread hoaxes, false claims and calls for violence toward the Rohingya Muslim minority. Some of the people spreading those hateful messages on Facebook were politicians, members of the military or other authority figures.
There were groups in Myanmar that begged Facebook to stop what many people — and indeed, Facebook’s own rules — regarded as the kind of speech that should be impermissible.
Facebook last year agreed with the UN, which said the company did not do enough to prevent itself from facilitating ethnically based violence.
It was not Facebook’s principles that helped cause a genocide in Myanmar. It was the reality of Facebook. A company that is home to 2.7 billion people did not pay enough attention to the downsides of free expression in Myanmar and could not or would not do enough about it until it was too late.
Facebook has said it was “too slow to act” in Myanmar, one of the company’s stock lines when it gets caught being a launchpad for violence, propaganda or other ills when its principles collide with the reality of the world and the limits of the company’s capacity to understand the harm it can cause.
Facebook made things worse with computerized systems that rewarded the most outlandish ideas with greater distribution.
Facebook again and again — with Russia-backed groups sowing contentious ideas around the US election, in Myanmar, in Sri Lanka and other spots — has failed to recognize the harmful effects of its amplification of dangerous or divisive views until it was far too late, and then often tried to play down the damage it caused.
This pattern would be funny if the consequences were not so dire. Even when Facebook recognizes the problem, it is not clear it or any company of its size and scope has the attention and resources to assess all the cries of “fire” taking place all over the world.
There will be natural disagreements about where Facebook should — or whether it should — weed out some kinds of information or speech on its Internet hangouts.
However, when Facebook cannot identify or stamp out the worst abuses that come from handing a megaphone to 2.7 billion people, it is reasonable to ask whether its principles mean very much.
Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She was previously a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last