Mark Zuckerberg has been under immense and continued pressure to moderate Trump’s political speech on Facebook. He has continued to refuse to do so in the face of extremely negative press and direct pressure from his own employees. I think Zuckerberg’s contrarian position on this issue is (mostly) right, and I don’t think Twitter’s moderation policy will hold up to scrutiny or be effective long-term.

“I know many people disagree, but, in general, I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.” - Zuckerberg: Standing For Voice and Free Expression

Watch this exchange between AOC and Zuckerberg, specifically the question about taking down lies in political ads. AOC also attempts to clarify that she doesn’t mean ‘spin,’ but lies. This really gets to the core of the issue: who is determining the difference and how? Do we really want private companies, or Mark Zuckerberg specifically, determining which political speech from an elected democratic leader is a lie and which is not?

Zuckerberg gives a diplomatic answer here, but I think he could have pushed back harder. This responsibility should fall to AOC and the other elected leaders in Congress. If there’s to be policy around political speech and social media, it should not be the responsibility of private companies to determine when to censor or not censor the speech from democratically elected politicians, operating in countries with rule of law and a free press.

There are a lot of conditions on that statement, but it’s because the conditions are relevant and important. The same standard cannot be automatically held for politicians in non-democratic countries, countries without rule of law, countries that suppress speech themselves, or countries without a free press. The moderation standard is also different for the comments of regular people not in office (though this is still not a trivial problem). For politically elected leaders that meet these conditions though, it’s a bad idea to have private companies determine what speech from these elected politicians should and should not be seen by the public on their platforms.

The precedent this would set is both unmanageable and contradictory.

It’s unmanageable because most political speech is inherently partisan, which means it will be a political mess to effectively determine whether something is being removed because people find it misleading (‘spin’), because it’s a lie that’s intended to mislead, or because it’s a political policy people just disagree with. It will also be difficult to get consensus on this given the political nature of the speech. It’s inherently contradictory because if Trump says something outrageous that gets written about or quoted in the New York Times and then that is subsequently posted and shared on Facebook, should that kind of secondary quotation be removed as well? What about a less reputable paper? or a blog post?

This doesn’t mean private companies do not have a responsibility to be ethical in the absence of policy - they do, but when it comes to the moderation of elected political speech I think the only tenable outcome is to act as a viewpoint neutral platform. People should be able to see the speech of their democratically elected politicians. A bias towards free speech and anti-censorship is the ethical position. Citizens should be able to see this speech without it being blocked or modified, even if it’s stupid. The right action is for those citizens to then leverage their own speech to protest, act, and vote them out.

Once you’re setting limits on the political speech of a democratically elected politician, the rules that govern speech are now a political problem. Would you be comfortable with members of the party opposite of you deciding what speech should be restricted? If you’d only be comfortable with the members of the party you identify with setting the speech policies, then that itself is a problem. Support for free speech should be a bipartisan issue for this reason, it’s an underlying principle both can agree to that is independent of the specific content.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing Facebook can do, or even that they’re doing nothing wrong.

It doesn’t mean there’s nothing they can do because they are right to focus on the authenticity of the speech. Facebook should work to make sure political speech is coming from who it claims to be coming from (and they are focused on this).

It doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything wrong because they’ve long ago abandoned the chronological feed in favor of an algorithmically sorted feed focused on engagement. This is decidedly not neutral. If Facebook wants to act as a neutral platform for speech, then they should be neutral. If they are elevating certain content then they are playing more of an editorial role. This weakens their argument about being a neutral platform and makes them more responsible for what they programmatically choose to elevate (or not) on Facebook.

The other issue is the degree to which Facebook enables targeted political advertising.

Politicians have always tailored their message toward the audience they’re talking to, but I’d argue the precision and scale at which they’re able to do this now via targeted Facebook ads is a difference in kind. Most ads exist to persuade rather than inform, but with precise targeting and the selection of only specific messages for certain audiences, Facebook ads can leverage confirmation bias to maximize their ability to manipulate and polarize the public. I’d argue this kind of targeting should probably be limited.

At its best government and politics exist to enable effective human coordination at scale by getting the consensus of a society. Precise ad targeting at scale that focuses on specific issues for individual voters while hiding information that may contradict their existing beliefs serves to further polarize a country’s citizens by playing into their cognitive biases and turning everyone into a one issue voter.

I also reject the idea that this position on speech is the easy or self-interested thing for Zuckerberg to do, or that this is in Facebook’s interest. Political advertising makes up a tiny percentage of Facebook’s revenue. If this wasn’t a principled position they could just ban it entirely and save themselves the headache. Twitter’s limited moves to add a link and hide Trump’s tweet behind a warning generated enormous positive press for Twitter without any serious downside. If Zuckerberg wasn’t operating on principle he could just do the easy thing alongside (likely mild) cheers from his employees and the press, but the easy thing to do isn’t always the right thing. I think he’s trying to do what he thinks is right.

The kind of person who refuses one billion dollars at nineteen in order to pursue what they think is right is not easily pressured into doing something they think is wrong. For better or worse, Mark Zuckerberg thinks he is right.

I think he’s right too.