Masha Gessen, a Russian emigre and journalist, always has interesting commentaries on U.S. politics.
In this New Yorker article, she writes about Mark Zuckerberg and his flawed interpretation of the First Amendment.
In the course of the article, she reveals a startling fact. Zuckerberg is advising Mayor Pete.
Gessen writes:
What is the First Amendment for? I ask my students this every year. Every year, several people quickly respond that the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to speak without restriction. True, I say, but what is it for? It’s so that Congress doesn’t pass a law that would limit the right to free speech, someone often says. Another might add that, in fact, the government does place some limits on free speech—you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, or say certain words on broadcast television and radio. I ask the question a third time: What is the First Amendment for? There is a pause as students realize that I am asking them to shift their frame of reference. Then someone says that the First Amendment is for democracy, for the plurality of opinions in the national conversation.
My students are undergraduates, some of whom will become journalists. Before they leave the confines of their small liberal-arts college, they will develop a more complicated view of politics and the media than the one they started with. The adult world they are entering, however, generally sticks to an elemental level of discourse. Last week, for example, the head of the country’s largest media company, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, gave a nearly forty-minute lecturein which he reiterated that the right to free speech was invented so that it wouldn’t be restricted. In Zuckerberg’s narrative, as my colleague Andrew Marantz has written, freedom of speech, guaranteed by technological progress, is the beginning and the end of the conversation; this narrative willfully leaves out the damage that technological progress—and unchallenged freedom of all speech—can inflict. But the problem isn’t just Zuckerberg; more precisely, Zuckerberg is symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world,” Zuckerberg said in his address. “It’s a fifth estate, alongside the other power structures in our society.” Zuckerberg was appropriating a countercultural term: beginning in the nineteen-sixties, “the fifth estate” referred to alternative media in the United States. Now the head of a new-media monopoly was using the term to differentiate Facebook from the news media, presumably to bolster his argument that Facebook should not be held to the same standards of civic responsibility to which we hold the fourth estate.
This strategy of claiming not to be the media has worked well for Facebook. On Monday, when Bloomberg broke the news that Zuckerberg has advised the Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on campaign hires, the story called Zuckerberg “one of tech’s most powerful executives.” CNN referred to him and his wife, Priscilla Chan, as “two of America’s most influential businesspeople and philanthropists.” Vox’s Recode vertical calledhim “the world’s third-richest person” and observed that he had become so toxic that “accepting a political donation from Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 is nowhere close to worth the money.” (The Times appears not to have covered the story for now.) Any one of these frames makes for an important and troubling story: a Presidential campaign in bed with a major tech corporation, influenced by and possibly intertwined with one of the country’s richest men—that is bad. It’s worse when one recalls Buttigieg’s attempts to go after Elizabeth Warren during last week’s Democratic debate. Warren has called for breaking up Facebook’s social-media monopoly, and Zuckerberg has referred to Warren as an “existential” threat to the company. Now imagine if it were the head of ABC or CNN or the New York Times Company who had served as an informal hiring consultant to a Presidential candidate. It would almost certainly be a bigger story and more broadly perceived as troublesome. Most of us still believe that the media are an essential component of democracy, and that a media outlet that is partisan or committed to a single candidate, but not in a transparent way, is a bad democratic actor.
I am really grateful for this news.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and his other “platform” ventures are a real and present danger to our elections. He will not take responsibility for any blatant political falsehoods on Facebook. He is fine if Russia, China, and other malicious actors engage in spreading falsehoods.
A couple of days ago, Zuckerberg’ was trying for some Congressional support for his latest venture. He got more than he asked for and not relevant to his wish list.
Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez asked Zuckerburg what he would do if someone posted, on multiple Facebook pages, the wrong day to vote.
Watch Ocasio-Cortez’s Epic Takedown of Mark Zuckerberg (Video)
Why is that surprising?
Pete is obviously the darling of the billionaire/ CEO classes
Exactly. Match made in heaven. Or maybe the other direction.
Pete’s a McKinsey guy. On a prior occasion during the campaign he borrowed talking points from CAP.
Buttieg relies on the people who write the checks to navigate a niche on the left crafting a position that advances them.
A few weeks ago, I posted a list of candidates and how many of them were supported by billionaires. Bernie: 0. Pete had more billionaire backers than any other Democrat candidate
more and more a transparent DINO: “I care about people, but I simply cannot grasp why big money is the problem”
Let me get this straight: people seriously want Fakebook to be the arbiter of free speech? Are we seriously asking Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies to silence people we don’t want to hear from? Pause a moment and tell me you really think that’s going to end well.
Good point.
Better to let people hear all the idiotic viewpoints on Fakebook before deciding on the idiotic viewpoints they like best.
Or better yet. Don’t even go on Fakebook because it is , always has been and always will be a gigantic version of high school “Look how great I and my friends are” cliques.
The really pathetic thing is that some people (maybe even lots of people) actually believe what they see on Fakebook.
Zuckerberg said he won’t censor lies.
I will find and post a great exchange between AOC and MZ at hearings where she wanted a yes or no answer: will you post lies?
Zuckerberg would not know the difference between a lie and truth if he was standing on a cliff and someone dangled a dollar out over the void with a fishing pole.
He’d go for it regardless.
Should FB post political ads that they know are false?
When cheap paper was young, a radical journalist named Jean Paul Marat attracted a lot of attention in a little part of history called the French Revolution. Girondins so loathed him that Charlotte Corday came to Paris from a Girondin part of the country with the intent to kill him, thereby destroying the cause of all the violence and divisiveness in her beloved France. She succeeded I killing Marat. Otherwise she failed. Before she was able to kill Marat, Lafayette had tried to silence him by smashing his printing press. He failed too.
The reason killing Marat failed to stem the violence of that error is the same reason the death of facebook would not stem the tide of semi-factual offal that is spewing from its living room. It is simply a vehicle for the divisive influences that rive us apart these days.
We have become content to claim that yelling fire in our own personal theaters is fine. Everybody will know we are just “venting” or “ranting.” Problematic statements are so commonplace in all sorts of journalism now that bogus science, rumor, and accepted platitude almost rules the day. To the extent that Facebook has added to this, it is certainly culpable. But how to manage this reality is quite complex.
One possible solution is to reverse Citizens United. Politics has been gorging itself at the trough of money that has poured into public life in a way that makes the Guilded Age tarnish with embarrassment. Of all the decisions that have come from modern courts, this one, which gives the wealthy people like Zuckerberg a right to speak louder than anyone else, needs revisiting.
Listening to Zuck does not make one Zuck’s puppet. Frankly part of me believes the Dems need an illicit power on their side to counteract the ongoing Russian interference. If Zuck can get Pete elected over Trump, this liason might not be so bad.
What?
Hasn’t scat from tech monopolists already been found in the Putin camp?
Huh? Yuck.
If Buttigieg gets elected instead of Warren or Sanders, that will be better than Trump — for a while. Eventually, though, a Buttigieg administration will rob the working class of so much to further enrich and empower Zuckerberg, that in a few years conditions will be ripe for another rightwing autocrat promising to solve everything by getting rid of immigrants to come along and swoop into office. We can’t take any more inequality. We will descend into chaos.
33 years- the projection for when the ruling class will have 100% of American wealth (extrapolation of Fed. Res. data)
This is why China blocks most if not all of America’s social media websites. Freedom of speech should not mean freedom to lie and mislead.
https://www.saporedicina.com/english/list-of-blocked-websites-in-china/
Before President Reagon got rid of the Fairness Doctrine that was designed to deal with the media being used to mislead through lies and fake news, it wasn’t as easy to lie and mislead as it is now.
The Fairness Doctrine was about Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1880786,00.html
One man’s truth is another man’s lie. For example: “Anthropgenic global warming is not happening.”
In other words, truth is based on individuals’ confirmation biases. It doesn’t matter what the empirical evidence reveals. All that counts is what one wants to think, like this climate myth:
“There is no actual evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. Note that computer models are just concatenations of calculations you could do on a hand-held calculator, so they are theoretical and cannot be part of any evidence.”
But the REAL truth is based on the evidence and not what some idiot wants to think.
“The proof that man-made CO2 is causing global warming is like the chain of evidence in a court case. CO2 keeps the Earth warmer than it would be without it. Humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. And there is empirical evidence that the rising temperatures are being caused by the increased CO2.”
https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm
Yes, of course,
A talking horse
The Earth is flat
And all of that
The problem is that the surface warming doesn’t exist beyond the range of measurement error.
“The problem is that the surface warming doesn’t exist beyond the range of measurement error.”
Documentation, please.
MSNBC, at its site, has a form to submit the questions people want asked of candidates in the next debate.
I submitted, “Since Bill Clinton, Democratic politicians have sided with billionaires in the takeover of the public education sector, will you oppose charter schools and vouchers, neither of which, based on evidence is better than public schools? Will you prevent billionaires from taking over public universities and how?”
Thank you. I know that the moderators of the next debate are four women, with some connection to MSNBC, including Andrea Mitchell and Rachel Maddow. I hope this and other websites will circulate that form so the moderators receive a boatload of questions about K-12 public education, candidate views on standardized tests, vouchers, charter schools, data-gathering by tech companies selling products.
Great question, Linda
why wasn’t Buttigieg asked to comment in regard to this allegation. Then the article would have been more credible.
Give me his personal phone number an I will ask him.
The New Yorker has excellent fact checkers.
Google Zuckerberg and Buttigieg
The credibility of evidence is not a function of comment, especially from the subject of a report.
The notion that reporting accuracy is based on all sides being quoted reflects the misunderstanding that there are alternative facts.
Buttieg is whip smart. He knows there aren’t alternative facts, There are facts, alternate viewpoints and spin.
Herb,
You are concerned that the connection between Zuckerberg and Buttigieg is merely an “allegation.” You might want to read this article in Wired, which expresses concern about the connection between these two technocrats:
https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerbergs-embrace-of-mayor-pete-should-worry-you/