For 15 years, Facebook has been built around one idea: all sharing is good. “That's what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post in September 2006. In February 2009, on the eve of Facebook’s fifth birthday, he reiterated his position: “Since its founding, one of the constants of Facebook is that it has continuously evolved to make it easier to share.”
But if the last three years have taught Zuckerberg anything, it’s that too much sharing is a very, very bad thing. After years of providing a platform for misinformation and extremism, Facebook just banned 12 far-right groups and figureheads. The ban, effective from midday on April 18, included the BNP and its former leader Nick Griffin, the EDL, National Front, Knights Templar International as well as Britain First and its leaders Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen.
And Facebook says it will go further than just banning these organisations and individuals. It will also go after their followers. “Posts and other content which expresses praise or support for these figures and groups will also be banned,” the company said in a statement.
This is a dramatic switch for a company that, until a month ago, still talked about itself as a digital “town square” – a space where all voices, including the distasteful and dubious, jostled for attention, free from any interference. It is a seductive ideal that harks back to the early days of the internet and its promise of unfettered freedom of speech.
Zuckerberg’s town square philosophy positions Facebook as a neutral space, allowing people to gather together while being agnostic about what they have to say. It is a philosophy that equates Facebook with the internet itself – merely the infrastructure through which other people broadcast their thoughts. For over a decade, Facebook has presented itself as a blank sheet of paper, open to (almost) everyone. That is why, until relatively recently, Facebook resisted pressure to crack down on far-right extremism on its platform.
Then, in March of this year, Zuckerberg wrote a long Facebook post arguing that the era of the town square was over, and that Facebook would instead focus on enabling smaller-scale, more private, modes of communication – building out Messenger and WhatsApp instead of the News Feed. Social networks were still about sharing, he argued, but of a more restrained, kinder, nature.
But Zuckerberg was wrong. Facebook never was the town square. Far from being a place of neutrality, the News Feed – and its governing metric, engagement – amplified divisive content and suppressed the inane. It barged into the town square and handed every lunatic a megaphone, creating a space where fringe views could take centre stage. Its own algorithms made a mockery of the idea that Facebook was a neutral platform.
So what has Facebook done? It has embraced its lack of neutrality. The social network has always been allowed to ban whoever it wants – it has just chosen to exercise that right when public criticism has given it little other choice. Now that seems to be shifting as the company starts to explore what kind of platform it wants to be seen as – and whether that’s one where far-right views aren’t welcome.
This means Facebook admitting to itself that it isn’t the whole internet. The web is a big place and there are spaces, such as Gab, that allow almost any kind of speech. They aren’t very nice places, but perhaps it’s better that people who want to share hatred are isolated from an algorithm that will fling their vitriol in the faces of people who didn’t ask for it.
The rules that govern online hellholes such as Gab and 4Chan don’t work for a network of 2.3 billion people. But now Facebook needs to decide what kind of platform it wants to be.
Two-and-a-half years ago the social network defended its decision to keep Britain First on its platform, saying “Facebook is used by parties and supporters of many political persuasions to campaign for issues they feel passionately about.” Now it isn’t just banning Britain First and its leaders, but is also threatening to remove posts that praise them. Britain First hasn’t changed much in the last couple of years, but Facebook has.
It hasn’t done so willingly, of course. Facebook’s latest move is another attempt to quell the non-stop criticism that has beset the firm since the US election in November 2016. And Zuckerberg is running out of time. If he doesn’t work out what kind of social network he wants to run, there are plenty of lawmakers around the world who would be more than happy to make that decision for him.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
