[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
By Eric Bovim
Real Clear Policy
Poor Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook founder and CEO is frequently attacked by the political right for a supposed left-wing slant in the social network’s algorithms and editorial decisions. And the American left — as evidenced by a historic, mounting ad boycott campaign against Facebook — is sure that Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook are complicit in a vast right-wing/Russian conspiracy. Among other things, Facebook’s critics on the left blame the site for aiding Donald Trump’s election by promulgating “fake news” in 2016.
After a meeting with Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs to discuss the demands of a large advertiser boycott that now encompasses hundreds of brands, civil rights groups and activists ripped the company for treating their concerns as nothing more than an ornamental PR exercise. The American left now firmly believes that Facebook is no longer an agent of social progress, but an impediment to it.
For its part, Facebook has started to draw lines — ironically, to the ire of conservatives. Facebook “cancelled” the page of longtime Trump ally, Roger Stone, because of alleged ties to fake accounts in the 2016 election. For much of the summer, Zuckerberg has also been playing Hamlet to an employee insurrection — demands that he, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, take a hard stand against misinformation, and start to censor Trump and his presidential campaign’s posts.
If that were all there was to it, it would be easy to sympathize with Mr. Zuckerberg. There he is, trying to play the honest broker, besieged from all sides by self-interested parties seeking advantage by thumbing his carefully balanced scales of fate.
The trouble is that Facebook is an interested party too. It long ago ceased to be a neutral conduit for the posts, shares, and likes of its users. In its early years, Facebook grew its user base like crazy, but a business model to leverage all those eyeballs initially proved as elusive to Facebook as it had to so many victims of the earlier dot-com bubble.
So, Facebook made a choice. By degrees, but quite consciously, as early Facebook investor Roger McNamee details in his book “Zucked,” Facebook began actively manipulating what its users see in order to keep them “engaged” — keep them clicking, keep them “liking” and keep them sharing.
Thus, Facebook shifted from a relatively passive model of showing users what their “friends” were posting in an essentially chronological fashion to actively manipulating those users in order to drive up “engagement” — time spent on site, the number and percentage of stories “liked” or commented on or re-shared.
And along the way, according to McNamee, they discovered something ironic: There’s no “dislike” button on Facebook, but posts that produce negative emotions — outrage, anger, disgust — are much better and sucking us in and keeping us coming back. We “like” cat videos, but we love to get mad as hell.
Facebook could and does profit from that outrage. The deeper lesson is that outrage, whether justified or not, is good for business. Facebook knows this: They are not partisans of left or right, but merchants of outrage on both sides.
In this sense, Facebook is both accomplice and competitor with our politicians, which may be why Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg make them so uncomfortable. Our politicians are in the manipulation business too and have been as long as there’s been politics. But Facebook is muscling in on their territory, and the politicos want to know whose side they’re on.
The truest answer is that Facebook is like arms dealer — war is good for them no matter who’s winning, as long as both sides keep buying ads.
Some of our Solons would see Facebook defanged. Elizabeth Warren wants Facebook broken up. President Trump has floated revoking their protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — legislation that grants immunity to Internet companies from liability for the content posted by their users.
But breaking up the social-media empire is akin to beheading a hydra — each piece will grow back, and the pieces most willing to manipulate its users and best able to get away with it will grow fastest and profit the most. Breakup wouldn’t so much solve the problem as multiply it.
Decades ago, we put in place truth-in-advertising laws that are still enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. But we don’t have a modern equivalent for the social-media age. There’s no one — except the social networks themselves — to decide how much emotional manipulation of the public is too much, whether some techniques do or don’t lie beyond the pale.
Our web giants grew up in a regulatory Wild West. But those lands are settled now, and those businesses are vital outposts not just of commerce but of our very culture. It’s high time we start thinking about the laws we need to govern how the weapons of outrage are used against us all.
Eric Bovim is CEO of Avisa Partners U.S., a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
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