Conservatives are in something of a tizzy over a claim by a former trending topics moderator that Facebook deliberately suppressed conservative opinions and news sources. Senators have gotten involved:
South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, labeled the allegations in the anonymously sourced Gizmodo piece "serious."
"Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,” Thune said in a statement. "Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet."
To my Gen-x ears this sounds especially amusing. The above is a staunch conservative Senator arguing that Facebook—a private company -- has an obligation to ensure that its tending topics are fair and unbiased, representing the full range of American opinions. The good, conservative Senator is asking, in effect, for the return of the Fairness Doctrine.
For those who do not remember, the Fairness Doctrine was a rule of the FCC that required broadcast license holders to present issues of public controversy in a manner that was fair and honest. Conservatives did not like this requirement. They felt that it was an attack on the first amendment and property rights and they succeeded in killing it during the Reagan Administration. The last is an amusing consideration considering that the property being used in question was the very scarce and very publicly owned airwaves and spectrum. Tellingly, when the mid-2000s saw a push to reinstate the doctrine, one of the arguments against it was that it would cripple conservative talk radio. Conservative talk radio, it should be noted, was not known for dispensing news and opinions in an unbiased manner.
Now, I could have a lot of fun focusing on the hypocrisy of the conservative movement suddenly forgetting their deeply held principles when those principles appear to disadvantage conservatives, but a lot of people have already done that. What concerns me is that Senator Thune is actually correct, whether he realizes it or not. The Facebook story does demonstrate the need for a return to the Fairness Doctrine.
The internet has not let a million flowers bloom, or, at least, it has not allowed many of these flowers to be noticed. Half the North American internet traffic comes to just 35 sites. Facebook is obviously one of those sites. More, Facebook is deliberately trying to act as a news aggregator and it is succeeding:
IGN shared a week’s worth of data that showed the reach of Instant Articles versus non-Instant Articles. Reach was nearly double: Instant posts reached on average 12 percent of the publisher’s total audience of more than 3.5 million Facebook fans, while non-Instant reached an average of 7 percent of fans.
These are not small facts. There is a strong argument to be made that the internet is already creating a society that doesn’t share the same set of facts. Combined with the natural consolidation of attention to fewer and fewer sites, there is a strong argument that aggregation sites should be held to a standard that serves the needs of society rather than the needs of just their short term shareholders.
When dealing with broadcasters, the justification was simple: broadcasters were operating on the public’s property and thus were subject to reasonable constraints on their activity in order to advance the public good. Facebook is not a monopoly, of course. In a more rational world, the fact that it is a corporation would subject it to the same reasonable restrictions. Corporations are creations of the state, granted special tax and legal privileges in order to advance the goals of the state, most obviously a more robust economy. However, the current state of the law does not recognize this common sense fact and instead treats corporations as un-killable people. Facebook, however, is also arguably a monopoly.
We don’t really have much in the way of anti-trust enforcement in this country any more, but it is very clear that Facebook dominates social media and is using that domination to leverage a controlling stake in the news dissemination business. If we choose to enforce anti-trust rules, it would be reasonable to enforce a version of the Fairness Doctrine.
Despite Thune’s hypocrisy, he is not entirely wrong even if he doesn’t understand that. We live in an age of rapid media consolidation and effective monopolies. Much of our modern commons and information dissemination is controlled by corporations with little reason to do anything other than advance their own agendas. That is a dangerous situation for a civil society, and we must start thinking about enacting solutions with real teeth. Thune and his compatriots have stumbled inadvertently on one such solution. We should take them at their word and try to implement it.