Free Speech In the Age of Government-Influenced Facebook

 

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of MetaPlatforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, recently sent a letter to Jim Jordan, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  Zuckerberg is a busy man, and this was no bread-and-butter socializing note, but more along the lines of a confession. 

 

In the note, Zuckerberg admitted that in 2021, Facebook had caved in to government pressure, specifically from the Biden White House, concerning certain posts relating to COVID-19, "including humor and satire."  The company was also guilty of "demoting" stories about Hunter Biden's laptop when it chose to believe the FBI's claim that it was Russian disinformation in 2020.  In both cases, Zuckerberg says basically we were wrong and we won't do it again.

 

The most generous interpretation of this letter is that here is an upstanding citizen, who also happens to be the fourth richest person in the world, admitting that he and his people did some things that in retrospect might not have been the best choice, given what he knows now.  But hey, he's learned from his mistakes, and we should all feel better that Zuckerberg and his companies have admitted they messed up in what were understandably hard circumstances. 

 

Ranged against this rather anodyne letter are some cherished U. S. traditions such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.  Let's talk about the rule of law first.

 

In a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, professor of law Adam J. MacLeod outlines how the idea of rule by law rather than men arose during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (485-565).  Justinian caused twelve ivory tablets to be placed on public display, tablets that contained a concise summary of the laws of the land.  All disputes were to be decided on the basis of reasoning from what the tablets said, not from what somebody in power said.

 

In placing reason above power, the rule of law placed everyone on a much more equitable footing.  The peasant who could reason out law was now able to defend himself against a powerful lord who wanted to take his land, if the peasant could show what the lord was trying to do was against the law.  MacLeod admits that since the late 1800s, jurisprudence has largely abandoned the fundamentals that supported the rule of law, but in practice, vestiges of it remain.  No thanks to Zuckerberg, however, for those vestiges.

 

Although Facebook is not a branch of government, in bowing to White House pressure it acted as a government agent.  And its near-monopoly on social media channels makes it a powerful player in its ability to censor unfavored speech, such as people making fun of Anthony Fauci or other prominent players in the COVID-19 follies.  So where was the ivory tablet to which a satirical outfit such as the Babylon Bee could appeal when its posts disappeared?  Their only option was to mount a lawsuit that might take years, would certainly cost tons of money, and might in the end amount to nothing.  So much for the rule of law.

 

Some counter the claim that the principle of freedom of speech does not apply to private companies such as Facebook, because a private entity can allow or disallow anything it likes and be as capricious about it as they want.  If Facebook had the reach of my town paper, the San Marcos Daily Record, this argument would carry weight.  One little outlet being arbitrary about what it publishes is no big deal.  But Facebook, although not the only social-media show in town, is by far one of the largest, and its censorship, or lack thereof, hugely influences public discourse in the republic that is the United States, as it does in many other countries of the world with less of a tradition of free speech. 

 

Once again, while Facebook is not a government entity, when it takes actions that the government pressures it to do (either through legal means or simply jawboning), it becomes an agent of that government.  And while it is perhaps true that Facebook did not violate the letter of the First Amendment which prohibits only Congress from making a law that abridges the freedom of speech, the spirit of the law is that the Federal government as a whole—executive, judicial, or legislative—should refrain from suppressing the freedom of the people to express themselves in any way that is not comparable to yelling "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theater. 

 

There are two extremes to which we might go in this situation, at opposite ends from the muddled middle in which we presently find ourselves.  One extreme would be to treat near-monopolies such as Facebook as "common carriers" like the old Ma Bell used to be.  With very few exceptions, nobody regulated what you could say over the telephone, and in the common-carrier model, Facebook would fire all its moderators and only retain the engineers who would keep hackers from crashing the entire system.  Other than that, anybody could say anything about anything.  Zuckerberg wouldn't censor anything, and I bet he'd be relieved to be rid of that little chore.

 

The other extreme would be to regulate the gazoo out of all social media and set up explicit "twelve-tablet"-like rules as to what can and can't be said on it.  We have something like this model in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates what can be said or shown over the (public) airwaves (not cable).  The FCC is mostly concerned with obscene or indecent content, but that's just a historical fluke.  In a republic you can vote to regulate anything you want.  This would be a return to the pre-deregulation days of inefficient but reliable airline and phone service.  It would be duller and more predictable, but there are worse things than dull.

 

Neither of these extremes will come to pass, but the present near-total governmental inaction in either direction leaves a political vacuum in which Mark Zuckerberg, emperor of social media, will continue to do what he thinks best, and the rest of us simply have to deal with it.  And the rule of law and freedom of speech will continue to suffer.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article "Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some COVID-19 content during the pandemic," at https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc.  Zuckerberg's letter to Congress is at

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1, and I also referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.  Adam J. MacLeod's "How Law Lost Its Way" appeared on pp. 22-28 of the Sept/Oct 2024 issue of Touchstone.

 

Downsides of the Metaverse

 

One important task of the discipline of engineering ethics is to take a look at new technologies and say in effect, "Wait a minute—what could go wrong here?"  Blogger Joe Allen at the website Salvo has done that with the Metaverse idea recently touted by Mark Zuckerberg, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will now be known (officially, anyway) as Meta.

 

Allen denies that Zuckerberg was merely trying to distract attention away from the recent bad publicity Facebook has been receiving, and claims that the Metaverse idea is something Zuckerberg and others have been dreaming of for years, especially proponents of the quasi-philosophy known as transhumanism.  What are these dreams?

 

In the Metaverse of the future, you will be able to put on virtual-reality equipment such as goggles or a helmet, and enter an alternate universe fabricated in the same way that the Facebook universe, or the many MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) systems try to do in a comparatively feeble way today.  But the goal of metaverse technology is to make the simulation better than ordinary reality, to the point that you'll really want to stay there. 

 

It's not hard to imagine downsides for this picture.  Allen quotes Israeli author Yuval Harari as saying that mankind's power to "create religions" combined with Metaverse technology will lead to "more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era."  The Nazis could do no more than put on impressive light shows and hire people such as Leni Riefenstahl to produce propaganda films such as "Triumph of the Will."  Imagine what someone like Joseph Goebbels could have done if he had been put in charge of an entire metaverse, down to every last detail.

 

Impossible?  Facebook and other companies are investing billions to make it happen, and Allen points out that companies are also lobbying Washington to spend federal money on developing the infrastructure needed to support the massive bandwidth and processing power that it will take. 

 

COVID-19 pushed many of us a considerable distance toward the Metaverse when we had to begin meeting people on Zoom rather than in person.  Zoom is better than not meeting people at all, I suppose, but it already has contributed in a small way to a breakdown in what I'd call decorum.  For example, judges have had to reprimand lawyers for coming to hearings on Zoom while lying in bed with no clothes on. And I've talked on Zoom with students who wouldn't dream of showing up in class with what they were wearing in the privacy of their bedrooms, in which I found myself a reluctant virtual guest.

 

Of course, if we had the Metaverse, the lawyer could appear as an avatar in a top hat, tuxedo, and tails if that was what the judge wanted to see.  But the point is that there is a whole complex of social-interaction rules or guidelines that children take years to learn (if they ever do learn), and in a Metaverse, those rules would be set by whoever or whatever is running the system, not just by the individuals involved.

 

Zuckerberg insists, according to Allen, that his Metaverse will be "human-centered."  That may be true, but a maximum-security prison is human-centered too—designed to keep certain humans in the center of the prison.  While Facebook has its positive features—my wife just learned through it yesterday of the passing of an old family friend—the damage it has done to what was formerly called civil discourse, and the sheer amount of bile that social media sites have profited from, show us that even with the relatively low-tech means we currently have, the downsides of corporate-mediated social interactions reach very low points indeed.

 

Does this mean we should jump in with a bunch of government regulations before the genie gets out of the bottle?  Oddly, Zuckerberg is calling for some kind of regulation even now.  But as Allen points out, Zuckerberg may be thinking that eventually, even government power will take a back seat to the influence that the corporate-controlled Metaverse will have over things.

 

Those who see religions as creations of the human brain, and human reality as something to be created from scratch and sold at a profit—these are defective views of what humanity is, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out with respect to the anthropology of Marxism.  Transhumanist fantasies about recreating the human universe in our image share with Marxism the belief that human beings are the summit of intelligent life, and there is nothing or no One else out there to be considered as we remake the virtual world to be whatever we want it to be.  Even if you grant the dubious premise that the Zuckerbergs of the world merely want to make life better for us all instead of just getting richer, you have to ask the question, "What does 'better' mean to you?"  And whether the machinery is Communist or capitalist, the bottom-line answer tends to be the satisfaction of personal desires. 

 

Any system, human or mechanical, that leaves God out of the picture leads people down a garden path that ends in slavery, as John Bunyan's Pilgrim discovered in Pilgrim's Progress.  Before we are compelled to join the Metaverse in order to earn a living, we should take a very hard look at what those who are planning it really want to do.  Once again, we have a chance to set a new technology on the right path before we let it go on to produce mega-disasters we then have to learn from.  It's the engineers who come up with this stuff, and in view of the lack of interest or even comprehension that government representatives have for such things, perhaps it's the engineers who need to ask the hard questions about what could go wrong with the Metaverse—before it does. 

 

Sources:  Joe Allen's article "The Metaverse:  Heaven for Soy Boys, Hell on Earth for Us" is on the Salvo website at https://salvomag.com/post/the-metaverse-heaven-for-soy-boys-hell-on-earth-for-us.  I also referred to an article on John Paul II's views on anthropology and Marxism at https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jpii-anthropology.

Why Instagram for Kids?

 

Depends on who you ask. 

 

If you ask Instagram, which is part of Facebook, which is run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you will hear things like the following.  Despite our posted lower age limit of 13 for the regular Instagram image-sharing service, we know a lot of kids younger than that are lying to get on it.  We would prefer to create a new service designed just for pre-teenagers so we can customize it with parental controls and so on, and bring Instagram to those younger users who currently have to lie to use it.

 

If you ask the attorneys general of forty U. S. states, they will cite sociological studies that link social-media use to depression, anxiety, and bullying in young people.  Following the news in March that Instagram was contemplating this new service, the National Association of Attorneys General got together and issued a letter  in May to Mark Zuckerberg asking him not to do this thing.  That's as far as the letter went—they didn't say what they'd do if he went ahead and did it anyway.  But the implication is clear that lawsuits might be in the offing if the proposed new service causes problems in its targeted age group.

 

Way back in the dark ages of social media, shortly after 9/11/2001, I wrote an article speculating on the ethical implications of electronic communication.  The immediate context was the fact that during the Twin Towers attack that day, the radio systems that first responders were relying on to coordinate their uniquely challenging rescue efforts largely broke down.  At the time, I concluded that, other things being equal, more communication among human beings was better than less.  But back then, Facebook wasn't even a gleam in Zuckerberg's eye, and hardly anybody imagined the huge economic and social forces that growth of social media would lead to.

 

Some questions are like diamond drills.  If you keep asking them they just keep going deeper and deeper and sometimes reveal unexpected things.  One of these questions is the innocent-sounding, "What's the point?"

 

If you ask Mark Zuckerberg that question about Instagram for those under 13, I think the bottom-line answer must be to make more money.  There is a thin veneer of public service that social media likes to coat their enterprises with.  And there is justification for this veneer:  billions of people (yes, billions) successfully use social media for largely innocent activities such as keeping in touch with relatives and friends.  Because the vast majority of users do not pay for the service, Facebook and Instagram have to manipulate things so that their advertisers reach their intended audiences.  The user is the product and the advertiser is the customer.

 

Right off the bat, that step has strayed into a swamp that philosopher Immanuel Kant warned us against.  I am told that he said in effect, "Don't treat people as means, but only as ends."  That is to say, using people solely as a means to something else is wrong. 

 

Of course, every business enterprise in the world could be accused of such a thing, and so providers of goods and services should not treat their customers only as a means to make money.  And if Instagram goes ahead with its plans for the under-13 crowd, I'm sure they will make efforts to protect their users against some of the worst abuses that social media can be used for:  stalking, sexual predation, bullying, and other criminal activity.  But if they don't make money at it, they will have failed, because they are not a charity—they are a publicly-owned profit-making organization, and the point of such organizations is to make money.

 

There is a reason that Instagram currently says its users must be 13 or over.  Historically, at least within the last century or so, children were regarded as especially worthy of protection and special safeguards.  Just to give you an antiquated example, I attended the Fort Worth Independent School District from 1960 to 1972.  At that time, both teachers and parents made strenuous efforts to keep commercial enterprises and advertising out of public schools.  The only exception to this that I can recall is that in grade school, the teachers offered to let us practice saving money, and gave us little envelopes with the name of the First National Bank of Fort Worth printed on them.  That's it:  no TV, no sponsored commercial films, no nothing. 

 

I am told that things are different now.  History may judge our time as a peculiarly child-hostile period.  The ideal of a child being raised to adulthood by his two biological parents—one male, one female—is receding into the past as other situations arise that are more convenient to the parents, maybe, but shortchange the kids.  And I need not mention abortion as the ultimate child-hostile policy, but I did anyway.  In an era of declining birthrates, more people than ever are asking "What's the point?" about the whole business of childbearing in the first place, and coming up with a negative answer.

 

For a time, advertising on children's TV shows was also controversial, but that battle has receded into the distant past as TV itself turns into a bewildering array of shape-melding forms that anybody can access, even the baby in the nursery.  Short of getting laws passed that prohibit Instagram for kids under 13, even the state attorneys general can't do much more than write letters saying that they won't be happy if Instagram goes ahead with its plans.

 

Rather than further erode the influence and authority of parents over their children by taking even more of the child's attention away from the live human beings who care for them and using them as a means of profit as well as providing a dubious service that so far they have done fine without, I hope that Zuckerberg listens to the attorneys general and declares the under-13 set sacrosanct from further intrusions by his firm.  But to do so would indicate that he is getting a different answer to the question of what the point is than he's gotten up to now.  And so far, he's given no sign of doing so.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on the Instagram plans at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-for-children-under-13 and the reaction of the attorneys general at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2021/may/11/instagram-for-kids-the-social-media-site-no-one-asked-for.  Their letter to Zuckerberg can be found at https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/naag_letter_to_facebook_-_final.pdf.  I heard about this issue on the Drew Mariani Show, a feature of the Relevant Radio network.

Is Facebook's Libra Cash In Your Future?

A recent item in the San Jose Mercury News says that the social-media giant Facebook is planning to announce that it's venturing into the cryptocurrency business with something it has code-named Libra.  The earliest and most well-known such currency—Bitcoin—has not exactly taken the financial world by storm.  But Facebook is reportedly lining up cooperation with credit-card companies Visa and Mastercard as well as PayPal to make using Libra more appealing than its predecessors.

Most of my readers are probably familiar with the basics of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which is based on a technology known as "blockchain."  From what I understand, it's a way of guaranteeing that everybody knows what has been done and who owns what, but without anyone being able to trace ownership of a particular unit of currency beyond the person you are immediately dealing with.  Anyway, it works well enough to have attracted the attention of investors who have sent the value of Bitcoin on a roller-coaster ride that has enriched a few and impoverished probably just as many.  And the fact that most cryptocurrencies are subject to just such wild and unpredictable fluctuations is one big reason that non-speculators have mostly stayed away from them, unless their desire to transact illegal business with untraceable cash has overcome their fear of short-term changes in value.

The way Facebook plans to fix the fluctuation problem is to tie their Libra to a basket of government-issued currencies.  So the idea would be that anybody holding 100 units of Libras (or whatever they end up being called—I suggest "zuckers") could take them at any time and trade them in for a certain fixed number of pounds, dollars, and euros. 

That's fine in theory.  But if Facebook suddenly finds itself in the position of the Federal Reserve, able to issue as much or as little currency as it wants, and able to say how much the currency is worth, the firm will face temptations that few governments have been able to resist in the past.

The open secret about the U. S. Federal Reserve, and for that matter any entity that issues fiat currency, is that they can print money.  Or, what amounts to the same thing, they can loan you money that they don't have until they write you the check, but then you have to pay it back in real cash that you have to earn somehow.  This is why you almost never run across a banker in the line at the soup kitchen.  The Federal Reserve System is open to numerous criticisms, but at least it has some semblance of being under the control of the U. S. government, and if it went totally crazy one day we citizens would stand a chance of doing something about it before it bankrupted us all. 

Facebook, however, as a private (though publicly traded) entity, is under no such restrictions.  If the company chooses, it can go the way of the nineteenth-century "wildcat" banks that predated the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.  Back then, every bank that wanted to could issue its own currency, and many of them did.  But if you accepted a note from the Second National Bank of Podunk, Indiana, you were taking a chance that it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on if that bank had decided to go on a note-printing spree, which many of them did—and then closed forever, leaving holders of their notes with no recourse.

An entity as big as Facebook isn't likely to vanish in a shower of virtual zucker notes.  But there are reasons why sovereign governments typically reserve the right to issue the primary legal tender in their respective domains.  As is usually the case with governmental behavior, it has to do with power.

You may have heard the saying, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."  Nobody's saying Facebook will start taxing people and calling it that, but you can certainly picture them charging people for certain services involving their currency.  It turns out that the quotation is taken from an oral argument that the great U. S. statesman Daniel Webster made before the even greater U. S. Supreme Court justice John Marshall in 1819.  And at issue was the power of a state to tax guess what?  A bank.

Bitcoin, or for that matter all the cryptocurrencies lumped together, represent such a small fraction of all the money in circulation today that governments can afford to ignore them.  But suppose that Facebook's venture into this business turns out to be really successful.  People start getting paid in zuckers instead of dollars.  Banks start carrying your account balance in zuckers instead of dollars.  On April 15 you write a check to the U. S. Treasury in zuckers instead of dollars—uh-oh, that won't wash.  Uncle Sam gets to say how you pay Federal taxes, and he won't take anything but dollars.

If this alleged stabilization business with the currency basket works, maybe there won't be a problem with paying taxes in cryptocurrency.  But if governments haven't been able to resist the temptation to tamper with the exchange rate of their currency, my guess is that Facebook won't be able to resist the temptation either.  And presumably, Facebook (or whatever co-op ends up running the currency) will be able to determine how many zuckers are in circulation.  That right there is a temptation that is hard to resist.  Why go to all the trouble of developing a business model and charging customers and paying employees and making a profit, when you can just issue another few million zuckers and there you are?  And if the exchange rate stays constant, those zuckers are just as good as dollars or what have you. 

No, there are good reasons why any government faced with the advent of an increasingly popular medium of exchange that isn't under its control sooner or later grabs it for itself.  And I predict that either Facebook's venture into cryptocurrency will vanish in the welter of other such products without a trace, or if it becomes really popular and lots of people and companies start using it, Uncle Sam will come along and take away Mr. Zuckerberg's new toy.  Even if they are called zuckers. 

Sources:  The San Jose Mercury News carried the article "Who is Facebook getting to support Libra, its cryptocurrency?" on June 14, 2019 at https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/who-is-facebook-getting-to-support-libra-its-cryptocurrency/.  The attribution to Daniel Webster is from https://www.bartleby.com/73/1798.html.  For one of the clearest explanations of the Federal Reserve System, and for arguments that actually favor the limited issue of currency or its equivalent by private entities, I recommend distributist author John C. Médaille's Toward a Truly Free Market (ISI Press, 2010).