Facebook’s Darwinian Encounter

In its harshest terms, Darwin’s quote can be read to say, “adapt or die.”  Facebook must now confront this grim reality for the first time in its existence.  Having held to their policies in a time saturated with change, they are being unimaginably criticized and boycotted. Perhaps a surprise to Facebook more than to many observers.

For at least the past ten years, Facebook has steadfastly dismissed most of the red flags that have been brought to their attention. Content empowering racism, division, and hate has been a major topic of disagreement between Facebook and anti-hate groups for a long time.

The historic problems with Facebook have been more obvious to members of the internet community who are more attuned to the intersection of extremist and mainstream internet, but the problems were there, and Facebook knew it. Many years would go by before any research was done into the extent, intent, impact, or players in the hate appearing on Facebook.  

Facebook’s policy, then and now, is to let more content on the platform to allow debate, discussion, and discourse. To bring more material to the Marketplace of Ideas. Although racism, xenophobia, misogyny and marginalization should all be discussed, it is a very different thing to just allow it. Such policies have always been exploited. That is not feeding discourse. It is feeding hate. Instead of allowing bad content as a rule and removing it in exceptional circumstances, perhaps a policy of restricting bad content and allow it by exception is more circumspect.

Facebook ascended, in part, as the result of an unpopular move by MySpace to implement an eceptionally strong policy against hateful and inappropriate content. Reasonably, Facebook leveraged MySpace’s radical change to its own advantage, luring countless users away from MySpace. Unfortunately, it appears the lesson Mark Zuckerberg took away from that episode is that anti-hate policies are destructive to a platform’s health.  Perhaps there was a time when that was true, but that time has passed.

Any content area on the internet, if left unmoderated, will eventually be abused.  We have seen it time and again. There are no exceptions that come to mind. Those situations makes the valid Marketplace of Ideas look a bit like a burned out storefront.

Trump’s strident, abusive, and often irresponsible rhetoric is supported and enhanced by his online content. A common tactic in traditional hate communities it to spread supporting, self-validating material over numerous platforms and listed under many names to obscure its intent. Over time, patterns emerge and manipulation taking place becomes obvious. The deception is exposed and the true motivations uncovered. Hate, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and alienation can often be the sum of many parts calculated to come together when desired.  

We came into the information age thinking we knew what it was about and how it worked.  If Facebook is not prepared to adapt, and act against the weaponization of its platform,  the results are inevitable. There is always another contender in the wings.  

Jonathan Vick, International Networks Against Cyber Hate, 
North American Representative