The populist Right’s infatuation with slaying the Facebook dragon is asinine. The government is not going to remedy what’s wrong with our culture.
The populist Right’s infatuation with slaying the Facebook dragon is asinine. The government is not going to remedy what’s wrong with our culture.
S hould we outlaw the telephone, too . . . or at least put progressives in charge of what we’re allowed to discuss on it? Or maybe we should shut down the encyclopedia business . . . after all, some of the information in those tomes could really upset teenagers.
Absurd, I know. But we live in an age when what was absurd a nanosecond ago becomes mandatory.
The question of suppressing the instrumentalities that facilitate communication in a free society presses thanks to the star turn of Frances Haugen, the so-called Facebook Whistleblower.
Ms. Haugen was the unnamed principal source for a series of in-depth Wall Street Journal news reports on the supposed malevolence of the social-media giant, a company depicted as prizing profit over good corporate citizenship — as construed by the woke Left. It should then go without saying that, in conjunction with her 60 Minutes coming-out party, Haugen is the subject of a hagiographic Journal profile.
She is, natch, a bien-pensant progressive — a former Burning Man volunteer mediator! — with a track record of contributing to far-left Democrats and drifting malcontentedly from gig to gig when it turns out that no company is quite utopian enough. She relates having had an upsetting personal experience in her life that resulted in the pain of “losing” someone close to her to the scourge of “misinformation.” Specifically, a friend who helped her through a serious illness and held respectable “liberal political views” suddenly fell into reading online accounts about “how dark forces were manipulating politics.” Haugen’s best efforts notwithstanding, the friend “gravitated to a mix of the occult and white nationalism.”
She had previously “studied misinformation,” both in tech jobs “designing algorithms and other tools that determine what content gets served to users,” and in pursuing an MBA at Harvard (for which her then-employer, Google, paid the freight . . . after which she bolted, finding the company wasn’t inclusive enough of women). But the heartbreak of losing her friend to unsavory ideas transformed Haugen into an anti-misinformation crusader. How lucky for all of us, then, and especially for Facebook, that the social-media giant recruited her for a position that would stir her passion to protect “democracy” from the “spread of false information.”
She is bound and determined to save us from ourselves before it’s too late.
In the Senate, the Bolshevik Left and the dipsy populist Right are converging on a Brave New World — or is it an Old Soviet World? — in which the confines and content of acceptable speech will be determined by government diktat. So of course, the Committee on Consumer Protection, chaired by the oleaginous Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), was quick to invite Haugen in for a curtain call.
I checked out early, so I’m unable to report whether the senators feted her with their Christine Blasey Ford Award for Emoting My Truth to Power. No one seemed too upset, though, that before ditching Facebook because it was too focused on generating the revenue that paid her salary, she filched thousands of documents from its internal files — including in areas to which she was given trusted access even though they were unrelated to her responsibilities.
She is, after all, The Whistleblower! Indeed, a whistleblower whose name may actually be uttered in public — which seemed to be the whole point.
But blowing the whistle on what? If you slog through the thousands of words of Journal reporting based on Haugen’s loathing of free markets and her theft — er, I mean, revelation — of documents, there is no allegation that Facebook has committed any crimes.
Rather, it runs a business, a communications platform in which human beings, who are not vetted for vice or virtue before they join, exchange information. The company is hugely successful because it provides a service that people crave — there are reportedly over 2 billion users. Despite conservative complaints (including from me) about some partisan suppression of content, especially around election time, Facebook’s platform is substantially open to everyone.
Calculating that we’re mainly imbeciles (and why wouldn’t they?), the pols joined Haugen in presenting a laughably crimped version of Facebook, in which its service abets drug dealers, facilitates authoritarian regimes, and makes teenage girls cry.
It is a lamebrained case. Drug peddlers also thrive because they gobble up real estate, invest in muni-bonds to hedge against losses, and drive or fly to seal deals (should we outlaw gas?). I know MLB is giving the cagers a run for their money, but is there a bigger whore for authoritarian regimes than the NBA (unless you count the Obama administration’s pallets of cash for the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism, and the Democrats’ zeal to get the Palestinian Authority back on the payroll in time for the 16th year of Abbas’s four-year term)?
And how rich of Congress to fret that too much anorexia hype is available to 16-year-old girls . . . but have no problem with the availability in the next school-gym shower stall of the 16-year-old boy who says he’s a girl. This is a progressive political culture that has fought tooth and nail against every effort to rein in the immersion of children in hypersexualized pop culture and anti-American indoctrination. Congressional Democrats would go to court if a state tried to prevent a 14-year-old child in the fifth month of pregnancy from getting an abortion without parental consent, but we’re supposed to listen to them whine about the perils of . . . Facebook?
Moreover, it is simply ridiculous to caricature an enterprise by looking at its warts as if that were the whole story. The New York City subways of my youth (and there’s not much new under the sun since then) were dirty, crime-ridden, and overcrowded — a slow-rolling petri dish of infectious diseases. They also got me through high school, college, law school, and work in a way nothing else could. No one held a gun to my head to ride them (though while I was riding them was a different story). Weighing all their considerable downsides, they were a godsend to a 13-year-old kid longing to expand his horizons — even if some of the ads (and especially the graffiti) featured what we today preciously call “body-shaming.”
Everything is about trade-offs. If the upside of Facebook wasn’t phenomenal for consumers, there wouldn’t be downsides to quibble over. And those downsides mainly involve societal ills that Facebook inevitably reflects but does not cause. Rather than fixing Facebook, the Senate might think about how we fix those — which would mainly involve Washington’s minding its own business (business that only government can do and that the government we have is not very good at) and refraining from its suffocation of community life.
It is easy to see why the Left has it in for Facebook. It is a raging success of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, its execs make goo-gobs of money, and exploiting regulatory power to place its platform under Leviathan’s effective control would be a coup for progressive indoctrination. The populist Right’s infatuation with slaying the dragon, though, is asinine. The government is not going to remedy what’s wrong with our culture, and if you think having a speech bureaucracy monitor and purge political expression is going to level the playing field for conservatives, then you obviously don’t need Facebook to find out where the best mind-altering drugs are.
A sign of the times: After Tuesday’s whistleblower melodrama in what still somehow sees itself as the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, Facebook publicly pleaded with Congress to impose regulations on it. Mark Zuckerberg is no fool. Having achieved behemoth status with all the lobbying expenditures and political palm-greasing that goes with it, he knows he, singularly, can afford to be regulated. Washington tinkering will just strangle any would-be innovators while locking in Facebook’s dominance. The next big thing, the now-unknown burst of human ingenuity that always comes along to make a relic of today’s titan, will be stalled . . . at least for a time.
Of course, we know where Democrats are in all this: The party of Bill Clinton and Larry Summers has devolved into the party of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and AOC’s Squad. When the government finally sweeps away the last vestiges of free enterprise, you can thank what now passes for the Right, which is mindlessly morphing into the statist Left, all the while conning itself, and the rest of us, that it is beating the libs at their own game.