One of the most important speeches of the 2020 campaign will be delivered this week. Not by any of the candidates, but by Facebook’s chief executive.
Mark Zuckerberg will talk Thursday at Georgetown University in what’s being billed as “A Conversation on Free Expression.” What he has to say will likely signal whether his social media platform will once again be used for political manipulation — or whether it will apply reasonable standards of accuracy.
Thus far, from Facebook’s comments and actions in recent weeks, it seems the company has learned none of the lessons of 2016, when Russia’s Internet Research Agency used Facebook to try to influence the votes of millions of Americans.
Most notably, Facebook this month refused to pull down a Trump campaign ad that claims former Vice President Joe Biden “promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.”
The ad echoes the false narrative President Trump and his allies have been promoting about Biden’s actions. It was Trump’s urging of Ukraine’s leader to find evidence in support of the unfounded claim that led to the current impeachment inquiry.
CNN refused to air the ad. But Facebook, along with broadcast networks such as CBS and Fox, have run it. The question now for Zuckerberg and his social media giant is where they will draw the line. The answer thus far has been they won’t.
“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” wrote Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections.
What that ignores is that Facebook’s own platform has been used to undermine those “mature democracies with a free press.” Unchecked social media has become a medium for the proliferation of targeted falsehoods — one so voluminous that mainstream media cannot begin to fact-check and correct it.
We’re sympathetic to the difficulties of parsing campaign ads to determine if they walk right up to the line of lies or actually cross it. It’s not easy. But that’s not an excuse for ignoring the obligation. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not, Facebook is no longer just a platform, it’s a one of the world’s largest purveyors of news. And, with that, comes the responsibility to ferret out fact from fiction.
Nothing less than the future of our mature democracy is at stake.
— The Mercury News