IIt fell to Nick Clegg, once a great hope for liberal politics in Britain, and now a sad figure as a global lobbyist for a company with major PR problems, to announce that Facebook was once again open to business. disastrous business of Donald Trump. The decision was wrong, but it does not mean the end of democracy, as the alarmists say. equate Facebook with an inevitable triumph for fascism might think. What the decision does, however, is confirm the staggering hypocrisy of a corporation that apparently can’t, or won’t, learn from its complicity in repeated political disasters.
Hillary Clinton never stopped being ridiculed by her.”basket of deplorables” speech in 2016. However, the fact is that Trump and many of his supporters have said and done things that is it so deplorable. The really outrageous part was his offhand comment that some Americans were “irredeemable.” But democracy is based on the notion that no one is irredeemable, that we should never give up on our fellow citizens, difficult as that may be. Those who have engaged in anti-democratic actions must be given the opportunity to convince others that they have changed their ways.
Just as it is wrong to disenfranchise criminals for life, it is also wrong to exclude people from democratic politics forever. Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, after years of evading criminal punishment, was finally sentenced to perform community service. He subsequently he was able to return to politics, even making a strange debuted on TikTokwhere he strove to look young and excite the Italian team type despite looking, after multiple facelifts, like a wax figure of himself.
But Trump has paid no price for various crimes against democracy, nor has he ever shown the slightest regret for his role in what Facebook, in its official announcement, cautiously calls “civil unrest” (as if we were talking about a general conflagration). , with all sides to blame). By allowing you to reconnect, Facebook is signaling that neither the past nor what a perpetrator thinks about the past matters. It claims that unless Trump is on the platform, citizens have no chance of finding out what”the king of social media” (according to Nigel Farage) is thinking, depriving them of vital information, a patently absurd claim given that Trump continues to the most public american that ever lived. Not only that: AJ Liebling once observed that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who possess it; at least, the freedom to address the public is also guaranteed to those who have a social network.
True, if Facebook executives stick to the narrower justification by restricting speech, they can argue that Trump is not causing imminent violence. But even that is debatable. A recent post by Trump on his own platform, Truth Social, managed two African-American poll workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, whose lives had already been put to hell by the Trump team in 2020. “What will the Great State of Georgia do with Ruby Freeman’s MESS?” asked the former president.
Facebook points to new “railings” to avoid hateful posts. But the corporation must be well aware that far-right politicians have created a trap when it comes to content moderation: having convinced everyone that conservatives are unfairly disadvantaged by “big tech,” each sanction will be sold to outraged supporters as confirmation that the right is always the victim. If Trump stays on the platform, he wins; if he is eliminated again for breaking the railings, he wins too.
And Facebook too. For all his sanctimonious talk of “open debate” and “community,” his business model is to optimize for outrage; outrage means maximum “commitment” and therefore profit. Facebook’s attempts to create less toxic policies have been regularly invested because “engagement” seemed to have diminished as a result. Its highly touted oversight board, an impressive body of former politicians, judges and academics, can criticize individual decisions, but it can’t determine Facebook’s overall policy. Revealingly, the board he distanced himself of Trump’s decision immediately, emphasizing that he had not been involved; he also called for more transparency. But transparency is of course what platforms have always denied for both governments and researchers.
On one level, Facebook may know that its business model is hopeless, as it is bound to produce more and more scandals. The fact that we are now calling Facebook’s parent company “Meta,” leaving behind the F-word, with its bad connotations, is an extraordinary public relations triumph. (Google never convinced us to say “Alphabet,” but then again, while also participating in Comprehensive surveillance and data theft.it was arguably never as evil as Facebook).
Much is generalized about social media killing democracy. Each media revolution has created a moral panic – the printing press supposedly gave us the religious wars; the radio provoked Hitler; Television allowed McCarthyism. But this technological determinism is easy; innovations have also deepened democracy. Social networks and Facebook’s business model are not the same. However, Trump’s decision demonstrates that Facebook simply cannot let go of its “incitement to capitalism”.
