Facebook’s efforts to police itself are doomed to fail

Rejoice! Facebook will remain a Donald J. Trump-free zone — at least for now. That was the ruling of Facebook’s oversight board this week, an ostensibly arm’s-length body created by the company to adjudicate decisions about what can and cannot stay up on Facebook.

That the mendacious, amoral, linguistically challenged former president has been denied another platform is, in some ways, happy news; at least we will continue to be spared one more outlet for his vapid, xenophobic ravings.

But the entire debacle of how and why Trump was banned, and what the oversight board’s decision means for Big Tech’s impact on speech in the digital age is itself no cause for celebration. To the contrary, it is another sign of how we have outsourced control of the public sphere to a small cadre of private companies — and we let them oversee themselves at our own peril.

To recap: in early January, Facebook “indefinitely suspended” Trump. His presence on the platform presented a risk of further inciting the sort of violence we saw in the shocking Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6. The decision was referred to the recently assembled oversight board — a sort of “Supreme Court for Facebook” put together by Facebook itself but officially independent — which is meant to handle the thorniest cases of content moderation on the platform. (Disclosure: the author of this piece was part of a consultation roundtable about the oversight board in Ottawa in 2019.)

This week when they handed down their decision the board essentially said two things, each perhaps at odds. Firstly was that Facebook was correct in the rationale for its ban, and that Trump’s presence on the platform did in fact increase the risk of violence. But secondly, the board also stated that Facebook’s ban was in contravention of its own policies, and that since there is no actual rule about Trump’s “indefinite suspension,” Facebook must return to the decision in six months.

That latter point could, with a bit of licence, be put another way: the decision to ban Trump was ad hoc, likely pushed by an anxious management rather than policy, and a sign that Facebook, rather than being some responsible arbiter of the public sphere, has no clear rules about how to handle the accounts of world leaders, or the rising threat of the so-called new right.

It also points to how its own efforts to police itself are doomed to fail. Though the oversight board is technically independent, it cannot ultimately force Facebook to behave in any particular way except in regards to specific pieces of content it examines. As a case in point, of the 46 questions the board asked regarding the Trump case, Facebook declined to answer two partially, and seven entirely.

Thinking the oversight board will rein in Facebook is thus like assuming that the fossil fuel industry will adequately police its own reaction to climate change: it is an assumption that is as naive as it is dangerous.

What makes this all the more frustrating and worrying, though, is that Trump was, almost inadvertently, a sort of symbol or example of how a modern reactionary movement plays with the boundaries of speech to push abhorrent ideas like white supremacy, racism, transphobia and more. When the socalled alt-right is found “just asking questions” about immigration or trans rights, or insists upon its right to openly debate the right of certain people to live freely, it also highlights the limits of Facebook’s liberalism in the face of the new fascism.

Liberal ideas of free speech are, after all, meant to preserve an open arena of speech in which everyone, no matter how reprehensible their views, has a chance to speak. It’s an important ideal — the reason that you or I can talk about almost anything we like and also why, say, Black or LQBTQ activists could fight for their rights.

The digital, however, upsets that dynamic because instead of an arena of speech, there is an arena of algorithms. The right to be on Facebook isn’t just about being able to speak, it’s about the right to be amplified — not just to be free to speak, but to be free to have an audience.

That is a crucial difference, because rather than the genuinely noble idea of free speech, it is instead about polluting public discourse, overwhelming clear, rational debate with inflammatory noise that drowns out more reasonable voices — an idea that Trump’s ceaseless domination of the news cycle is but one example.

That it took the insurrection to finally get rid of Trump shows just how vulnerable Facebook and social media are to being manipulated by extremists and demagogues.

It also means that, however one wants to read Facebook’s efforts at moderation — whether well-intentioned reaction or nakedly cynical self-interest — it’s doomed either way. Facebook is trying to understand its position as arbiter of the digital public sphere using ideas from the newspaper age.

Am I glad Trump is off Facebook? Of course. He was and is a curse upon the world, our attentions, and our well-being. But the when, how, and why of Trump’s disappearance is far more discomfiting. Like a warm day in February, it feels good in the moment — but may well be the augur of something much worse.