I do not really use Facebook anymore. I used to. For several years now, however, my drug of choice has been Twitter. It is equally pointless but is more agreeable better than Zuckerberg's monster is for me.
I haven't deactivated my account because I still use FB as a means of logging in to several services and websites. l would delete all of my existing posts and content if Facebook did not make this really hard to do. One all consuming social media site is more than enough for one person.
Anyway, I received a surprise message yesterday informing me I am not allowed to post or comment on Facebook for 30 days. This is a punishment for breaching her “community standards” regarding dangerous individuals and organisations. I looked into this further because I haven’t posted anything in months. Had I been hacked?
No. The offending content was this picture, shared in 2016. Presumably as a nod to Mike Godwin.
Did the Facebook machine somehow think the picture was glorifying Nazism?
I lodged an appeal but after setting out why I thought a mistake had happened received an automated message telling me, more or less, to forget it. Not enough moderators or whatever to review the content for the time being. I expect the matter has been lodged in a queue that will come back to me in a few months to let me know the result long after the suspension has expired.
This leaves me unable to post for a month. The personal cost of this to me is zero, since I don’t care for Facebook anyway. I also don’t feel like my freedom of expression has been deliberately interfered with in anyway, since I doubt the same Facebook which doesn’t have enough people to look into the situation is unlikely to have singled me out to “silence” my non-existent posting.
Writers and creators who depend of the site for their livelihoods, however, might not be so sanguine in the same situation.* If nothing else, the unsatisfactory process does bring home just how much power social media networks have over our discursive lives.
In the last fortnight before the US election, Twitter disabled the account of America’s fourth largest newspaper because it. could not prove the legality of purported information the paper was reporting on. Notwithstanding the shadiness of the story itself, the reaction is deeply unsettling. The fact that the New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch should be of cold comfort too.
In these matters, it is always useful to consider how you would feel about how you would feel should the same pressure be brought to bear on people and institutions you support. How many big stories have been broken through leaks like the one the New York Post reported on? Dirty politics comes to mind.
Those of a more dogmatic libertarian persuasion like to shrug their shoulders at this point. The standard argument is that social media sites are private businesses which means they are ipso facto incapable of behaving censoriously. There is nothing to stop me creating my own version of Facebook if I don’t like theirs.
If this doctrinaire view was ever realistic, it isn't now. Facebook enjoys monopoly status and has a long history of killing off prospective rivals.. It is not subject to real competitive pressures. As others have noted, where once people dreamed of creating the next Facebook, the best that can be hoped for these days is to be acquired by Facebook.
The common law calls firms of this nature, "common carriers" - which is to say that they are big and dominant enough that they have an obligation to serve the public without discrimination. Utility firms are often subject to this treatment and many on left and right heel the sane should apply to social media too. Increasingly, I am one of them.
For the libertarians, one consolation may be that is not necessary to create an expensive apparatus to have proactive oversight of Facebook.You could simply pass a law stating that, for the purposes of civil rights law, dominant market players like Facebook have the same obligations as the state. The social media behemoth would then be deterred from inadequately resourcing its moderation through the risk of a civil claim.
Needless to say it is hard to see New Zealand effecting any reform of this nature. It would have to start in the United States where social media firms have a lot of control over political campaigns now. And of course there are allegations Facebook regularly suppresses content critical of Facebook..
Which, you know, sounds like something Hitler would do.
* I am sure many of my own detractors will argue that this is just desserts after I laughed at a joke by Hillary Barry about conspiracy party Advance N2 having their page shut down just before the election. I laughed at the joke because it was funny. I would laugh again. That does not mean I can't worry about the influence tech has over our lies.