Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today takes us beyond the “Facebook Trump problem” to get to the even more serious serious problem stalking politics and American life due to Facebook. He goes into detail about the Trump ban and what it means and then says this:
I am glad Trump is still off Facebook, but the anticipation for this decision and the narrow focus on Trump obscures two much larger problems.
First, whether Trump has an official page or not is somewhat beside the point. With or without Trump, Facebook is a festering swamp of Trumpism. An hour or so after the decision, Kevin Roose of the New York Times sent out his daily autogenerated tweet with the top-performing link Facebook posts in the U.S. Per usual, it was a horror show. The top three posts are all from Ben Shapiro. The top ten also include two from Dan Bongino, two from Fox News, and one from Sean Hannity.
For all of the conservative complaints about “Big Tech,” Facebook’s algorithm rewards Right Wing propaganda over all other content. This algorithmic perversion of the political discourse is the source of much of what ills our country. Rewarding this content is a choice that Facebook has made for reasons of profit and politics. That will still be true even if Trump’s suspension remains in place.
Second, Facebook is too big and too powerful to be held accountable. The company has been subject to huge, well-coordinated boycotts becoming something of a pariah. Millions have deleted the app in protest. Yet, the company just reported another quarter of massive earnings growth.
As Zephyr Teachout wrote yesterday in the Daily Beast reacting to the decision:
The minute we start anticipating a corporate decision with the intensity that we anticipated today’s decision is the minute we should realize Facebook is way too powerful. It controls the faucets on the flow of information, and decides which news stories thrive and which ones are hidden, what is scientifically backed Covid advice and what is not, what is terrorism and what is expression and what constitutes a conspiracy and what does not. And it does all this based on cash flow.
Over the next several months, there will be multiple efforts to pressure Facebook to keep Trump off the platform. I will support them all and hope they succeed, but I want us all to keep focused on the bigger problem of Facebook’s role in spreading conspiracy theories and radicalizing segments of the American public. Like with everything else in American political, its too easy to focus on the dangers of Donald Trump at the expense of trying to address the existential threat of Trumpism run amok.
Over the next several months, there will be multiple efforts to pressure Facebook to keep Trump off the platform. I will support them all and hope they succeed, but I want us all to keep focused on the bigger problem of Facebook’s role in spreading conspiracy theories and radicalizing segments of the American public. Like with everything else in American political, its too easy to focus on the dangers of Donald Trump at the expense of trying to address the existential threat of Trumpism run amok.
This is way beyond Trump now. He’s actually becoming more of a symbol to his followers now while propagandists and other bad actors continue to seed the civil discussion with bullshit. Facebook is a truly malignant force as far as politics and culture are concerned. If all you want to do is share your kids pictures and chat up your old high school boyfriend, it’s great. But honestly, every other promise it once offered has been corrupted.