Oh what a tangled web we weave
So I guess we’ll talk about the president’s Executive Order against social media?
It all starts, like everything else these days, with a tweet:
After the president tweeted this, Twitter introduced a new fact-check button, something that a growing chorus has been chanting about for years (less about the specific functionality, but more about the ability to give readers the ability to see when lies, falsehoods, untruths are present).
This followed on the heels of the president tweeting out to his 80+ million followers a conspiracy theory that a former staffer for one of his antagonists, Joe Scarborough, was perhaps murdered while working for Scarborough. The former staffer’s husband wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for the company to remove the president’s conspiratorial tweets. Twitter said no.
The president, like everyone else these days, took to Twitter to voice his opinion about the new fact-check function.
And then he did what only he can: created an executive order “to propose and clarify regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law largely exempting online platforms from legal liability for the material their users post. Such changes could expose tech companies to more lawsuits,” according to Reuters, which has seen a draft of the executive order.
As the Washington Post notes:
The law [Section 230] is controversial. It allows tech companies the freedom to police their platforms for abuse without fear of lawsuits. But critics say those exceptions have also allowed some of Silicon Valley’s most profitable companies to skirt responsibility for the harmful content that flourishes on their online platforms, including hate speech, terrorist propaganda and election-related falsehoods.
Last night, legal experts (aka lawyers) weighed in on the president’s directive to curtail 230. In the New York Times:
“It’s unclear what to make of this because to a certain extent, you can’t just issue an executive order and overturn on a whim 25 years of judicial precedent about how a law is interpreted,” said Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John’s University who studies online speech and content moderation.
Ms. Klonick, who said she had seen a draft version of the order, said that it was “likely not going to be upheld by a court.”
The National Law Journal rounded up thoughts from legal experts, which all said that this executive order was “unlawful and unenforceable.”
The last several years have highlighted how the social networks have drawn a line in the sand, saying they are not a) media companies and b) arbiters of truth. As we recently discussed, they most certainly are media companies. As for arbiters of truth, it’s a slick dodge.
They are businesses. Their goals are, as public companies, to generate revenue for shareholders. However. They are also, at this moment, among the most important aspects of our society. They are conduits of information, and at a time when the institutions that once provided that function—religion; town squares; journalism—are losing their voice, the platforms have become the main place where people get their information.
Their companies allow for the distribution and dissemination of content. There is a responsibility in this that, for now, the companies have decided it’s not their position.
This morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a pre-taped package for Fox News (this is smart P.R., by the way: send your message directly to the president through the network we know he watches religiously) said, “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Critics were quick to the draw (I recommend clicking through and reading Judd’s full thread):
And so we find ourselves talking about an executive order that has no legal merits, CEOs wrestling with balancing the nature of their business with the nature of how their business has created the toxic environment we live in.
At a time when 102,000 Americans have died of a pandemic that experts say could have been blunted through stronger executive branch leadership;
At a time when 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment because of the impact of the coronavirus on businesses, 2.1 million in the last week and when economic inequality is highlighted by how the wealthiest of Americans saw their worth jump by $434 billion during the same time period;
At a time when the Justice Department closes investigations of multiple Senators who benefited from insider trading, including allegedly benefiting from the pandemic;
At a time when a man was killed in Georgia for jogging; a man killed in Minnesota while detained by a police officer; a woman calling the police on a bird watcher—because of the color of their skin;
At a time when conspiracy theories burst into popular discourse, purposefully muddying the waters while stoking more anger and fear and hatred;
The social networks/platforms/media companies/whatever we want to call them have a responsibility.
But so do the companies that pay their bills. Think how quickly the conversation changes should the world’s largest companies, with their billions in ad spend, decided to rise up to the challenge of the very promises they themselves put forth when they talk about ‘brand purpose’ and ‘brand safety’ and not give these companies a dime until they fix themselves.
The Clash, “I Fought the Law”
Thank you for allowing me into your inbox today, and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, please drop me a line!
Some interesting links:
Why Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” has become a prop for many politicians and journalists (NYT)
The US publishers hiring staff despite news media storm (FT)
The ‘new normal’ is just another bullshit line marketers have swallowed (MarketingWeek)
Google says employees can expense $1,000 for office furniture (NYPost)
The demise of local news is a pandemic (The Atlantic)
15 percent of all Facebook content is video (Social Insider)