Zuckerberg Announces Coordinated Attack on Intellectual freedom

Is that dramatic title justified? Let’s take a look at what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. In the following rather long excerpts, pay attention to the emphasized portions, which are mine. In Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race, Zuckerberg wrote:

Key to our efforts has been finding and removing fake accounts — the source of much of the abuse, including misinformation. Bad actors can use computers to generate these in bulk. But with advances in artificial intelligence, we now block millions of fake accounts every day as they are being created so they can’t be used to spread spam, false news or inauthentic ads.

Increased transparency in our advertising systems is another area where we have also made progress. You can now see all the ads an advertiser is running — even if they aren’t targeted to you. Anyone who wants to run political or issue ads in the United States on Facebook must verify their identity. All political and issue ads must also make clear who paid for them, in the same way as TV or newspaper advertisements. But we’ve gone even further by putting all these ads in a public archive, which anyone can search to see how much was spent on each individual ad and the audience it reached. This greater transparency will increase responsibility and accountability for advertisers.

As we’ve seen from previous elections, misinformation is a real challenge. A big part of the solution is getting rid of fake accounts. But it’s also about attacking the spammers’ economic incentives to create false news in the first place. And where posts are flagged as potentially false, we pass them to independent fact-checkers — such as the Associated Press and the Weekly Standard — to review, and we demote posts rated as false, which means they lose 80 percent of future traffic.

We’re not working alone. After 2016, it became clear that everyone — governments, tech companies and independent experts — needs to do a better job of sharing the signals and information they have to prevent this kind of abuse. These bad actors don’t restrict themselves to one service, and we shouldn’t approach the problem in silos, either. That’s why we’re working more closely with other technology companies on the cybersecurity threats we all face, and we’ve worked with law enforcement to take down accounts in Russia.

“Governments, tech companies and independent experts.” “independent fact-checkers — such as the Associated Press and the Weekly Standard.” What’s missing from this list? We the individuals that make up the general public, who will never get to analyze for ourselves the “misinformation” or “false news.” What we will be allowed to see will be decided by “the experts.”

Now, private companies like Facebook have the right to manage their networks, even if it involves bias reflecting management’s political leanings (although that would be stupid business). But this goes beyond that. Straight from the horse’s mouth, we see that there is an unholy alliance between governments, big companies, the established big media, and who knows what other “independent experts.”

There may be regulatory extortion going on, such as when Senator Dianne Feinstein warned Facebook, Google, and Twitter, "You created these platforms, and now they're being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will." Or when Sen. Al Franken criticized these companies because they "failed to take commonsense precautions to prevent the spread of propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech." Given the regulatory power these politicians have, these statements can only be taken as threats. And how much pressure is being applied behind the scenes--and in what manner?

But however this unholy “fact-checking” alliance has come about, it’s a major threat. Governments can censor directly, or through the regulatory apparatus. This is not to say that private companies should not cooperate with law enforcement when legitimate laws are broken, such as laws banning foreign governments from interfering in our elections. But putting an “expert” elite in charge of being the arbiter of truth is a power associated with dictators, not American law. In America, intellectual freedom is the law, and is codified in the First Amendment--freedom of religion (conscience), speech, press, association, and petition. Free countries leave everyone--truly everyone--free to express and debate and get at the truth, as Americans always have--free from expert information and news gatekeepers. Wasn’t that Facebook’s original mission?

Related Reading:

The Life and Death of a Hollywood Blacklist: Sometimes censorship is a public-private partnership.--Jesse Walker for Reason

The Banning of Alex Jones: Facebook Choice or Regulatory Extortion?

Note to Net Neutralityists: Be Careful What You Wish For

The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech--by Kimberley Strassel

The Anti-Free Speech Fallacy of ‘Dark Money’

Making Private Donations Anonymously is a Right