Drew Angerer/Pool via AP
Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen listens to opening statements during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021, in Washington.
Sunday, Oct. 10, 2021 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
The first thing we do is hire all the lawyers.
I know, this sounds like the punchline to an old lawyer joke. Only this time there is nothing funny about what Facebook and other social media platforms are doing to Americans — young and old — in their insatiable quest for profit.
Don’t misunderstand me, profit is a good thing. But, at what cost?
The revelations this past week of that brave, young whistleblower who left Facebook after she determined that the reason she was hired — to reduce the threats to our democracy and the lives and health of Facebook users — was just so much hooey.
Frances Haugen managed Facebook’s “civic misinformation team.” She testified before Congress this past week about how she became alarmed that the company made choices “prioritizing their own profits over public safety — putting people’s lives at risk.”
A bipartisan congressional committee seemed all too willing to listen to her as she talked about Facebook’s internal reports that indicated, for example, that teenage girls were more likely to harm themselves because of the news and information the company’s algorithms were bombarding them with during their every waking moment. That was on top of the huge role that Facebook’s civic engagement software played in the Jan. 6 insurrection!
And it appeared — at least for now and before the company’s multimillion-dollar lobbying brigade gets into high gear — that the lawmakers were intent on doing something about this threat to our democracy and our children’s lives and well-being.
I remember almost 20 years ago, I was in Israel for Shimon Peres’ 80th birthday. Myra and I wound up in a car with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I took the opportunity to ask them to explain to me why social media platforms were not held to the same standards regarding the publishing of false, libelous and misleading news and information the same way newspapers, television, radio and magazines were.
They happily explained that the law did not find them to be publishers in the traditional sense. Since they did not ”curate” the information — meaning no humans made decisions about what to publish on their sites — they could not be held responsible for truth, falsity, defamation, lying, incitement and a whole host of other proscriptions that applied to traditional publishers.
I told them I didn’t agree; the way they disseminated information and news to their users was no different that what we did for our readers. And, I asked them, if you are not responsible, who is? They laughed as in they didn’t care.
Fast forward to 2021 and we now know — who could know or even understand back then — that there are algorithms used by social media companies that determine who gets what news and information, no matter how false that information may be. And Facebook and the others are still not responsible if they publish false statements and inspire idiots to insurrection.
To which I ask, why not?
We now know what Brin and Page so giddily boasted about so many years ago was not true. There are humans curating the information they send to billions of people around the globe. That makes them no different from newspapers and other traditional publishers. Except they are not responsible for their misdeeds and their misinformation.
It should not matter whether it is a human editor making the decision about what to publish, or a human being writing an algorithm which decides what to publish. We know now that behind every good or bad algorithm — and soon AI doing the same thing — there is a man or woman writing that code.
So, as Congress grapples with how to bring Facebook and the others to heel — so that kids don’t commit suicide in greater numbers, adults who still believe in fairy tales aren’t encouraged to vote those reality-free beliefs, and unpatriotic Americans don’t commit insurrections leading to death and destruction and the possibility of ending our democratic way of life — let them consider the R word.
With great power comes great responsibility. At least, before social media that was the case. Facebook and other similar sites offer the world unlimited potential for good. And, unfortunately, unlimited opportunity for ill.
If the Facebooks of the world had to face responsibility for their actions I believe they would self-police. The marketplace would encourage compliance with the same laws to which other publishers are subject.
And if that doesn’t work, there are thousands of lawyers across this country who are ready, willing and able to make them pay for the harm they cause to Americans and America’s democracy every day.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
