Facebook: honest mistake or unbridled greed?

How many people reading this use social media? It seems likely that if you take the time to read an editorial in a newspaper, signaling caring about the issues affecting your community and your life, and you have a computer, the connection social media affords would appeal. And for readers who are not in the younger demographic, Facebook is often the platform of choice. After all, Facebook is an easy and free tool to use to share photos and opinions with groups of friends and family. The older user may venture into Twitter or Instagram, but mostly not the dozens of other options. 

So how many of us noticed ads going by on Facebook during the 2016 election cycle that seemed over the top, on either side of the political spectrum? Did they affect your opinion more than you may have thought? This is not a small concern, but rather a very large one. 

When those in power at Facebook, including its chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first denied there were any fake, propaganda-based ads on their platform, then resisted sharing with the government any of the more than 3,000 such ads they eventually found, they made it clear that their priorities do not include being respectful to and honest with their incredibly large community. The corporation also made that clear in 2011, when it successfully made the case to the Federal Election Commission that it should be exempt from the rules requiring disclaimers on political ads in print, broadcast or radio, basically because their ads are so small. See their arguments here: https://saos.fec.gov/aodocs/1174825.pdf. 

Now that Zuckerberg has decided to share the ads with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference with the U.S. elections, it seems he has realized the previous approach of keeping political advertising buyers secret might not have been the best idea. He told CNN last week, “We’re going to make political advertising more transparent.” Big of him, but it’s a little bit late to have realized there might be some profound responsibility associated with running a mammoth worldwide communication platform. Couldn’t Zuckerberg have taken a Journalism 101 course before ruling the world of information?

lt’s not as if there were no precedent that would have given Facebook an idea of the right way to approach taking in political advertising. After all, every newspaper, radio and TV station in the United States is required not only to confirm how political ads are being financed, but also to publish that information right in each ad as disclaimers. How charmingly old fashioned, really, in the wake of Citizens United. Why bother with all that?

Guess we found out why. Too bad that Facebook and their highly paid attorneys apparently never heard of journalism or civic responsibility. Maybe Jeff Bezos could give them a primer on why it might be worthwhile to look at  the way things have been worked out over time to try to avoid having loads of false information provided by amoral trolls without identification. But clearly the amount of easy money to be made ignoring such difficult questions and finding answers to them has just been too hard to resist. 

If this bothers you, as it should, let Facebook know. They’re always asking you how you’re feeling, and why you’re doing what you’re doing on their platform, so let them know how you feel about their inability to recognize propaganda whose delivery to you they are facilitating. 

And of course, this applies just as fully to Twitter and all the other social media choices. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if the most open communication platform in the history of human civilization, the internet, took down the democratic societies that gave it the ability to function and grow so very freely?