Facebook country
On Wednesday, in response to a proposed law intended to "address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms," Facebook announced that it would "restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content." Facebook's position appears to be that it is not cannibalizing other publications but effectively hosting free advertising for their products, and that it is not Facebook's fault that news publishers are failing at "navigating the changes that come with becoming a digital-first business." Facebook is accordingly confident that its walled garden will continue to thrive without users posting links to news stories.
One reaction to this decision (which may be nothing but a temporary bargaining tactic) is to see Facebook as reneging on the responsibility it has assumed by virtue of its own success of providing a "digital public sphere" that answers to the needs of civil society rather than the demands of shareholders and the ambitions of its executives. For example, in this New Republic piece, Jacob Silverman concludes, "If there’s going to be a digital public sphere, we simply cannot let Facebook dominate it with all the power of a nation-state and none of the political accountability."
Facebook, on this account, has become a utility provider, an essential service that must be seen as too big to fail — that it is no more conceivable to imagine a society without Facebook than it is to imagine one without electricity. When it unilaterally decides what kind of discussion can occur within the "digital public sphere" — understood by virtue of Facebook's scale (and the company's own self-serving portrayal) as basically the only real one that matters — it behaves like an authoritarian state. To combat this, it needs good governance reforms — which implies taking its risible "Supreme Court," described in this New Yorker piece by Kate Klonick, at face value as a step in the right direction.
But rather than regard Facebook as a new kind of sovereign state tussling with other nations, other commentators see it simply as a multinational business that makes a range of profit-oriented business decisions based on the prevailing conditions in various jurisdictions. Far from being the "digital public sphere," Facebook is, on this view, just an adaptable business model. If it changes its business model to be even less reliant on news links (as though such links were even necessary for users to go to war with each other over current events), so much the better for news, which will no longer be warped to the same degree by Facebook's incentives in distributing it.
This newsletter from tech reporter Casey Newton and this TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick both make the point that the world is probably better off if people stop treating Facebook like a public sphere. Newton writes "to the extent that [its clumsy bans] teach Facebook’s user base to seek their news elsewhere, they can serve a noble purpose." Masnick points out that "people who are saying that this move by Facebook is somehow an 'attack' on news or an attack on Australian sovereignty seem to be admitting more than they'd really like: that they think Facebook must be a dominant source of news in the country." Maybe no news is good news.
The overriding point is that people should not be encouraged to imagine themselves as "citizens" in a Facebook "republic." (This would be as delusional as users' thinking they are Facebook's customers rather than its product, as the saying goes.) Reifying Facebook as a nation-state through rhetoric about its duties and responsibilities to the public doesn't serve the end of preventing all political engagement from being restructured on the terms of tech platforms and with their ultimate interests in mind.
Some critics are concerned that "news" bans would reduce the quality of information on Facebook and allow disinformation or misinformation to circulate freely — as if "news" always consisted of "truth" and as if users were studiously reading the news links rather than posturing with them. But any information that appears on Facebook is always already "disinformation"; it's always intrinsically and conspicuously nonobjective by virtue of what Facebook purports to be selling its users: the ability to express themselves. Facebook has no investment in framing information as objective, and not as something that fosters "engagement" and "sharing" and "connection." It has every economic incentive to deliver "news" in a form that allows it to be used to maximize engagement and self-expression and in-group solidarity, all of which the company can harvest for its profit-making line of selling ads. Facebook's model of circulation turns everything it ingests into untruth — into something whose truth is found in the fact of its circulating. Its model of discourse is "more," which takes precedence over creating knowledge or informing users.
Rather than petition Facebook to be better arbiters of what should be seen as true or as news, it might be more effective to urge every government agency and every small business and everyone we know to stop using Facebook. Neither result is likely, but if the goal is a "public sphere" worthy of the name, killing Facebook is more to the point than fixing it.