'Too big to fail': why even a historic ad boycott
won’t change Facebook
The company has survived previous seemingly
existential crises with little damage to its monarchical structure
Julia
Carrie Wong
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew
Published
onSat 11 Jul 2020 06.00 BST
On the
evening of 13 July 2013, a few hours after George Zimmerman was acquitted over
the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Alicia Garza logged on to her
Facebook account and typed a phrase that would change the world:
“#blacklivesmatter”. A few minutes later, she posted again: “Black people. I
love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
That
Facebook played a small role in the inception of a movement that may have
become the largest in US history is the kind of story that the embattled
company likes to point to when it makes its case that it does more good than
harm. CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted of the hashtag’s origin on Facebook in
October 2019, when he delivered a speech about his view of free expression at
Georgetown University.
But however
much credit Facebook thinks it deserves, the days of utopian thinking about the
social media platform’s ability to foster positive social change are gone. On 8
July, the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an organization founded by Garza
and two fellow activists, officially endorsed the Stop Hate for Profit boycott
that has seen more than 1,000 companies forswear advertising on Facebook for at
least the month of July in protest of its failure to combat hate speech. On the
same day, a long-awaited civil rights audit excoriated Facebook for an
inconsistent and often incoherent approach to protecting the bedrock values of an
equal society, specifically citing that Georgetown speech as an ideological
“turning point” with “devastating” effects.
The growing
boycott and damning audit are just two expressions of a hardening consensus
that Facebook is no agent of social progress, but rather an impediment to it.
These criticisms are not just coming from leftwing activists or embittered
competitors (a common dismissal of journalistic critique) but increasingly from
Facebook’s own “community” of technologists, employees and former employees.
Still,
despite the unprecedented nature of the ad boycott, it seems unlikely that
Facebook will fundamentally change. The company has weathered seemingly
existential crises in the past and managed to emerge with its leadership team,
market capitalization, and business model intact. “This is not yet the straw to
break the camel’s back,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice-president and principal
analyst for Forrester Research.
A company
with ‘quasi-sovereign power’
In 2017, as
Facebook came to grips with the fact that it was being blamed for the election
of Donald Trump, the company debuted a new mission statement: to “build
community and bring the world closer together”. This summer, Facebook did just
that, bringing together a diverse and unprecedented coalition of non-profit
organizations and massive for-profit corporations in opposition to itself.
The
precipitating event for the Stop Hate for Profit campaign was Zuckerberg’s decision
to allow Trump to quote a racist 1960s police chief’s threat against the
hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest the alleged
police murder of George Floyd: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Trump’s
statement was widely read as having the potential to incite vigilante violence.
The traditional media contextualized it with explanations of its historical
resonance. Twitter hid it behind a warning label and prevented users from
amplifying it. Facebook left it alone, with Zuckerberg reiterating his belief
that “we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause
imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies”. By
dint of Trump’s position in government, Zuckerberg argued, the statement was
not incitement but “a warning about state action”, and warnings of state action
were allowed under Facebook policies, though that policy had never been
“spelled out” before.
Zuckerberg’s
reasoning was met with stunned disbelief by US civil rights leaders, as well as
experts and advocates in free expression. That he would privilege the right of
the most powerful person in the US to threaten violence against civilians over
the right of those civilians to exercise their right to dissent remains a
fundamental contradiction in Zuckerberg’s conception of free speech, one that
operates in tandem with the company’s decision, announced by the company
executive Nick Clegg in September 2019, to exempt the speech of politicians
from its own third-party fact checking program.
This
inclination to privilege Trump’s speech over others has continued with the
company’s bizarre refusal to enforce its well-intentioned rules banning voter
suppression against a president who is unambiguously using the platform to
attempt to suppress the vote.
“Elevating
free expression is a good thing, but it should apply to everyone,” the civil
rights auditors wrote in reference to these policies. “When it means that
powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else
does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less
powerful voices … Mark Zuckerberg’s speech and Nick Clegg’s announcements
deeply impacted our civil rights work and added new challenges to reining in
voter suppression.”
The
auditors also drew special attention to Facebook’s poor track record on
identifying and banning hate groups. Until March 2019, Facebook argued that
white separatism and white nationalism were distinct and less dangerous than
white supremacy. Though Facebook reversed that policy, the auditors appeared
frustrated that the company continues to define white nationalism too narrowly
– and has ignored their suggestions for improvement in this area.
Facebook’s
chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, who led the company’s participation
in the audit, said that the “two-year journey has had a profound effect on our
culture and the way we think about our impact on the world”, adding: “It has
helped us learn a lot about what we could do better, and we have put many
recommendations from the auditors and the wider civil rights community into
practice. While we won’t be making every change they call for, we will put more
of their proposals into practice soon.”
Sandberg
and other executives have also defended the company against criticism of its
efforts on hate speech, arguing that they invest heavily in systems to remove
hate and catch 89% of hate speech before it is reported. (“Ford Motor Company
cannot say 89% of its fleet has seatbelts that work and still sell them,” said
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.)
Whether
Facebook will ever hit upon a more coherent approach to protecting the free
expression of the powerless as well as the powerful depends on whether it ever
comes to grip with its own role as the largest censor in the history of the
world.
“Facebook
is governing human expression more than any government does or ever has,” said
Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center
for Internet & Society. “They have taken on the task of defining hate
speech and other unacceptable speech, which is a quasi-sovereign power … and we
the public have no opportunity to contribute to the decision-making, as would
be the case if the decisions were being made by a government.”
Indeed,
despite company executives’ paying lip service to the concept of democracy from
time to time, Facebook is structurally monarchical, thanks to Zuckerberg’s
majority control of the company’s voting shares. Asked to describe the
company’s decision-making process when it comes to Trump’s posts on a recent
conference call with reporters, Clegg sounded less like a former deputy prime
minister and more like a royal courtier when he explained: “For the most
difficult decisions, there’s one ultimate decision maker, our CEO and chair and
founder, Mark Zuckerberg.”
One of
Zuckerberg’s few concessions to criticism of his power has been the
establishment of an “oversight board”, which will eventually be empowered to
overrule him on certain decisions related to content takedowns. But the group
appears to be in no hurry to step into the debate over Facebook’s handling of
Trump, at least not before the November election. On 7 July, it responded to
calls for its intervention with a statement that it “won’t be operational until
late Fall”.
Meanwhile,
Facebook’s stock price has already recovered from the hit it took when Unilever
joined the ad boycott, suggesting that despite its success in generating
headlines, the campaign is unlikely to have a lasting financial impact. “For
some of the marketers that have joined the boycott, it is possible they were
intending to pull back anyway for pandemic-related reasons,” said Debra Aho
Williamson, principal social media analyst for eMarketer. “In addition, we
believe that other advertisers will actually increase their spending on
Facebook in July, taking advantage of potentially lower ad prices in certain
categories where advertisers have pulled out.”
Chatterjee,
the Forrester analyst, concurred. “If you choose to be cynical, it is easy to
see how a story about budget-crunched media cuts can easily be purpose-washed
into a stand on social justice,” he said.
Chatterjee
also pointed out that even as Facebook endures a “tongue-lashing in the US”, it
continues to consolidate and expand its power abroad, such as through its
$5.7bn deal with Jio Platforms in India, an investment that he expects will
give it “unprecedented access to Indian consumers”. “#StopHateForProfit is a
big deal in the context of US sentiment, but for Facebook there are also other
big fish to fry,” he said.
To the
University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, campaigners
against Facebook need to come to grips with the global nature of its threat.
“One of the
most frustrating things about the rise of Facebook criticism in the past three
years has been its relentless focus on Donald Trump and the United States of
America,” he said. “The US got off easy in 2016 – the same year that Rodrigo
Duterte took over the Philippines by riding Facebook to victory, and two years
after Narendra Modi took over India by riding Facebook to victory. Much of the
world suffers from all of the Facebook maladies much worse than the US.”
Vaidhyanathan
argued that solutions to Facebook’s ills cannot be achieved with oversight from
above but will require a more fundamental shift from below.
“We have
the potential to imagine radical interventions, and they have to be radical –
they have to get to the root of Facebook,” he said. “The root of Facebook is
the fact that it is a global intrusive surveillance system that leverages all
that behavioral data to target both ads and non-ad content at us.
“Go for the
root. If you can sever that, you pretty much destroy Facebook. It’s just a
website at that point, and that would be lovely.”
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