Facebook's Role in a Democracy

Over the last several weeks, the social media giant Facebook has been on the hotseat for its dealings with a consulting firm called Cambridge Analytics.  Evidently, Facebook shared the data of more than 80 million of its users with the firm, which was working for the Trump election campaign at the time.  The details are rather murky and one's view of this particular breach depends on one's political affiliation.  So rather than get down into the mudpit to sling more mud about this specific incident, I would rather take this opportunity to examine a more basic and far-reaching question.  What is the proper role of a huge social media company such as Facebook in a democracy?

To answer that question, we need to have some notion of how a well-functioning democracy works.  Political scientists generally regard a democracy as consisting of a government run by elected representatives.  The people (or some chosen subset thereof) get to vote for these representatives, and in turn the representatives construct and operate a government which observes certain rights of the people and subjects them to the rule of law. 

Speaking from an engineering point of view, a democracy can be considered to be a kind of control system.   Things needing the government's attention affect the votes and opinions of the masses, who elect representatives to do something about these things.  The representatives enact laws that ideally decrease the gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be.  That gap is never wholly closed this side of Paradise, but the narrower it gets, the better the democracy works.

Notice that in the description I just gave, the phrase "the way things ought to be" is really a statement of morality or justice.  In a country of over 300 million people, you are never going to get perfect agreement on anything, let alone matters of morality and justice.  But the beauty of democracy is that if most of the people broadly agree on something that the government can or should do, the democratic system has a way to deliver it.  And sometimes it even does.

Control systems have feedback loops, and in the most general view of such things, what is fed back is information.  And the same is true, broadly speaking, of democracies.  The people inform their representatives of their opinions about various matters by voting, as well as contacting them directly.  The representatives vote and pass bills using this information, and the information solidifies into laws, which are sort of like operating instructions for both the government and the people.  Anything that short-circuits or distorts this process is a potential threat to the proper functioning of a democracy.  In particular, any influence that can sway voters unduly or by fraudulent means must be carefully observed, and if necessary, dealt with somehow to restrain it from distorting the flow of information.

Newspapers have been around longer than the U. S. Constitution, and in the very early days of the country, some steps were taken to repress the freedom of the press.  But wiser heads quickly realized that to let the government say what could and could not be published was a gross distortion of the democratic process.  And so the First Amendment was passed to guarantee freedom of speech.  In doing so, the founders regarded the people as being wise enough to judge what opinions and alleged facts they should pay attention to in casting their ballots.  But the proper functioning of the system relies on that judgment, and ever since then there has been a tension between two extreme positions that the media can take in political activities.

One extreme is to attempt complete objectivity:  to report everything of significance in as unbiased a way as possible, and to let the voters make up their own minds.  This extreme was never approached very well, but in the glory days of the major city newspapers of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Associated Press came close, motivated as it was by its desire to sell its stories to newspapers of as wide a range of political persuasions as possible.  And when mass media required huge investments and consequently had only a few outlets (such as the three major TV networks that prevailed for the first thirty years or so of network TV), viewers usually got basically the same news from everywhere.  Maybe it was slanted somewhat, but at least everyone was working from the same page. 

But Facebook is as different from that as you can get, and comes closer in some individual instances to the other media extreme of total partisanship at the expense of reason and even truth.  Add to that the fact that huge parts of Facebook are a mystery to everyone outside it.  The old brick wall between the editorial and the advertisement sides of print journalism has vaporized, and the opinion writers are the readers are the advertisers.  Instead of a clean, easy-to-analyze feedback loop from the media to the voters to the government, we now have a messy tangle of voters who are the media, and who are also maybe Russians with secret axes to grind, and political operatives using data from millions to target certain groups without letting them know what is going on.  And it is all being done for profit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  But unlike the old simple lines of profit from print advertisers, whose ads could usually be clearly distinguished from editorial matter, the motives of Facebook and its paying customers are confused, obscure, and sometimes even contradictory.

Can a democracy function when such a confusing mess plays a significant role in elections?  Our democracy is still functioning, in the sense that we still have a Senate and House of Representatives, a President, and a government.  But whether the flow of information back and forth has been hijacked by an influential few, or whether the voters' collective wisdom will rise above even this level of confusion to lead us to a better place, are open questions that only time will answer.  I just hope the answer is something we can live with.

Sources:  An article by Stephanie Bodoni carried in the Apr. 7, 2018 edition of the Austin American-Statesman entitled "Facebook to engage Europe on data scandal" was the motivation for this piece.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the U. S. Constitution and the First Amendment. 

The Explosion at West: Who Regulates the Regulators?

When about 60 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer blew up last April 17, killing fifteen people and destroying $100 million worth of property in the town of West, Texas, a great many people were surprised about a lot of things.  I’m not sure how many citizens of West knew enough Texas history to recall the 1947 Texas City explosion that killed 581 people when two ships carrying ammonium nitrate exploded.  In testimony before the U. S. Senate this week, it was revealed that members of the West fire department were unaware of the potential hazards of the ammonium nitrate stored at the fertilizer plant where they were called to fight a fire shortly before the explosion occurred.  A chemical engineer at the same hearing stated that if the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules regarding ammonium nitrate storage had been enforced at the plant, the explosion might not have happened.  The very fact of the hearings, though, is something that brings up a broader question of how laws and regulations concerning ammonium nitrate are made and enforced in the U. S. today.

Handling ammonium nitrate is a little like playing the lottery in reverse:  most of the time nothing happens, but once in a great while, you hit big.  If the fertilizer compound was as dangerous as plutonium, for example, there would be no question about imposing strict and rigid regulations on its handling and use.  But many thousands of tons of the product are used for both fertilizer and intentionally as explosives every year without incident.  What do you do about a product that is safe 99.999...% of the time, but every so often hauls off and makes the headlines with a major disaster?

This is fundamentally a problem of justice and prudence, two of the four cardinal virtues recognized by the medieval age (the other two are temperance and fortitude, in case you’re wondering). 

One way to deal with the problem would be for every private firm that handles ammonium nitrate to comply voluntarily with the technical recommendations of OSHA and other experts:  store ammonium nitrate far away from other chemicals and combustible materials, ensure that storage facilities have sprinkler systems to prevent fires, keep the stuff in non-combustible containers, and so on.  I have never run a fertilizer plant, so I can’t say how much more this would cost compared to the way things are done today.  But I suspect it would be more or less of a challenge for every plant handling ammonium nitrate to change its ways as described.  It would be the right thing to do, assuming the costs wouldn’t be so prohibitive as to bankrupt the outfit (and the West plant, it turns out, had gone through bankruptcy a few years earlier).  And maybe some plants and distributors are taking these actions already.  But probably not all of them will.

Another way to deal with the situation would be for us to hire enough government regulators, inspectors, and other bureaucrats to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again on U. S. soil.  This is where things get fuzzy with regard to how laws and regulations are made at the federal level. 

In principle, the United States is a government of, by, and for the people.  That should put “the people” at the top, as the ultimate authority over not only Congress (which is the branch of government most responsive to the people’s will, at least nominally), or over the President, but even the judiciary as well.  It is nothing new to say that this authority has had difficulty getting itself asserted in recent decades.  I would like to concentrate on one particular aspect of this problem:  the ever-growing presence of federal regulatory agencies and agents, and how they can be made more responsible to the public they are supposed to serve.

In a recent issue of the conservative journal National Review, columnist Rob Long points out that we now have a situation in which unchecked and largely unmonitored growth of federal bureaucracies is virtually guaranteed.  As federal-employee unions campaign for administrations and representatives who favor the indefinite increase of government bureaucracies, the number and power of unelected bureaucrats increases in an apparently never-ending spiral. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, IF every dollar spent on a bureaucrat yields a true dollar’s worth of improvement in the health, safety, and general well-being of the commonwealth.  But who thinks that is the case?  And what mechanisms do we have in place for ensuring that bad and unproductive bureaucrats and bureaucracies are reigned in or eliminated?  From what I can tell, one of the main checks on bureaucratic power is hearings such as the one in the U. S. Senate last week.  If it goes as most such hearings go, members of Congress browbeat bureaucrats before the cameras for a day or two and then everyone goes back to business as usual, which for Congress means raising funds to be re-elected, and for bureaucrats means. . . well, it depends on the bureaucrat.

This is not to tar all government employees with the same brush.  Millions of them are hard-working, dedicated, and deliver the taxpayers’ money’s worth in the form of useful service.  But my quibble is with the absence of an efficient, effective, and swift way to feed back problems with governmental regulatory actions (or inactions) so that the bureaucracy responds and gets continually better.

In private enterprises under capitalism, the market is the main way that efficiency is rewarded and incompetence is punished.  But I am not calling for the privatization of government, necessarily.  I’m not really sure what the answer is. 

Possibly (and this is coming from an educator, so take it with a grain of salt) some type of civic and even moral education would help.  In a better world than the one we have,  the managers of the West fertilizer plant would have known enough, and spent enough, to store ammonium nitrate in a safer location.  The members of the fire department would have known enough to call for an emergency evacuation at the first sign of fire in the fertilizer plant’s ammonium nitrate storage area.  And any government regulators involved would have been local people, people who lived in the town they protected and knew the people whose lives they were concerned about.  They might have played roles in helping the firefighters and plant owners learn and change their ways.  But as for the way things are now and as far as the citizens of West were concerned last April 17, the billions of dollars spent in Washington over the years on OSHA, the EPA, and all the other alphabet-soup outfits with a remote connection to this tragedy were wasted.

Sources:  I used material from a “mystatesman.com” subscriber-only site maintained by the Austin American Statesman, namely an article by Brenda Bell posted on June 27, 2013 at http://www.epa.gov/osweroe1/docs/chem/ammonitr.pdf.  I also consulted Wikipedia’s articles on the Texas City disaster and the cardinal virtues.  Rob Long’s article “Bureaucratic Rot,” which may contain more information about fish guts than you care to read, appeared on pp. 21-22 of the July 1, 2013 issue of  National Review.