News Information and Media Site: Byers Market: The Mark Zuckerberg logic

June 3, 2020

By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles &

AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco

Good morning. 🔥 The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker counts 211 violations against journalists amid the ongoing protests, including 33 arrests and 143 assaults, 118 of which were done by police.

• In a new letter, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press declares that "any targeting of reporters for doing their jobs... is beyond the pale in a free society."

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Future of speech

The Mark Zuckerberg logic

Moving the Market: Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to convince restive Facebook employees of his rationale for not taking down President Donald Trump's incendiary post — "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" — is a landmark moment in the long, ongoing debate over free speech and censorship on social media.

• The Facebook chief's argument, which he conveyed to employees yesterday, is that Trump's post did not run afoul of company policy because it did not pose an imminent threat of violence. Furthermore, as a warning of possible military action by a sitting U.S. president, it needed to be seen, not censored.

• Note: Facebook's policy on posts inciting violence is binary. If it incites violence, it goes down; if not, it stays up — no matter who posts it. This is different from Twitter, which placed a warning label on Trump's "looting/shooting" tweet but kept it up because of "its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance."

• "We basically concluded... that the reference is clearly to aggressive policing — maybe excessive policing — but it has no history of being read as a dog whistle for vigilante supporters to take justice into their own hands," Zuckerberg said, according to audio obtained by Recode.

Zuckerberg's interpretation may be semantically correct, but that may not matter to critics who see Zuckerberg's bias toward free speech as discordant with more pressing national issues like racism, police brutality and state power. Those critics want Facebook to take a moral stand. One Facebook employee I spoke to said she and her peers believe Zuckerberg "is wildly out of touch."

• Some critics may go further, arguing that Zuckerberg's bias toward free speech accommodates existing power structures that are racist and unjust. Like Switzerland during the World Wars, the argument goes, he is decidedly not on the side of the Allies.

The overwhelming urgency of the political moment has made it very difficult for Zuckerberg to make the case that his longstanding commitment to free speech and political agnosticism is beneficial for society, and that by taking a moral stand on one post he could undermine Facebook's neutrality, here and globally, with potentially disastrous results for open society.

• It is all the more difficult for Zuckerberg since many of his critics refuse to believe that he actually cares about these issues. The tech columnist Kara Swisher said Tuesday that Zuckerberg "isn't thinking about what's the right thing for history" — a bold thing to say about the founder of the world's most influential communications network, and someone who thinks in terms of decades, not days.

A better ambassador for the importance — and urgency — of free speech might be Ben Thompson, the Taipei-based tech columnist whose always insightful Stratechery newsletter carries more weight among Silicon Valley CEOs than perhaps any journalist who lives in the United States. In his most recent post, Thompson strays from business matters (his usual turf) to focus on George Floyd's death.

• "What made the Floyd story different than all of the surely similar examples [of racist police brutality] that went before it is the Internet, specifically the combination of cameras on smartphones and social networks," Thompson writes.

• If racism in America is "dust in the air," as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently put it, these technologies helped expose the dust — a dust that before the existence of the Internet often hid "in darkened rooms, unseen by the public."

Turning to Facebook, Thompson notes that social media networks have also helped exposed President Trump for who he is by making his thoughts — and his threats — more visible. (It should be noted here that Trump also made threats of military action on television. To the best of my knowledge, the television networks that carried these threats did not face internal protest from their employees).

• "What is so striking about the demands that Facebook act on this particular post," says Thompson, is "the preponderance of evidence suggests that these demands have nothing to do with misinformation, but rather reality."

• "The United States really does have a president named Donald Trump who uses extremely problematic terms — in all caps! — for African Americans and quotes segregationist police chiefs, and social media, for better or worse, is ultimately a reflection of humanity."

• "Facebook deleting Trump's post won't change that fact, but it will, at least for a moment, turn out the lights, hiding the dust."

The big picture: It is impossible to know exactly what would have happened if Facebook had taken down Trump's post. The employees who now claim to be ashamed of Facebook's actions may have instead found new pride in their employer. Meanwhile, their CEO would almost certainly have found himself embroiled in a public battle with President Trump that would have been watched closely by political leaders and free speech advocates around the world.

• What's not clear is whether it would have benefited the American public to have their president temporarily silenced on social media by a 36-year-old tech executive, with the power vested in him as Facebook's majority shareholder.

The fact that Zuckerberg even has that kind of power is troubling. Perhaps there is some solace to be found in the fact that he so rarely uses it.