Wired | Mark Zuckerberg holds up Facebook’s mission
to “connect the world” and “bring the world closer together” as proof
of his company’s civic virtue. “In 2016, people had billions of
interactions and open discussions on Facebook,” he said proudly in an
online video, looking back at the US election. “Candidates had direct
channels to communicate with tens of millions of citizens.”
This
idea that more speech—more participation, more connection—constitutes
the highest, most unalloyed good is a common refrain in the tech
industry. But a historian would recognize this belief as a fallacy on
its face. Connectivity is not a pony. Facebook doesn’t just connect
democracy-loving Egyptian dissidents and fans of the videogame Civilization;
it brings together white supremacists, who can now assemble far more
effectively. It helps connect the efforts of radical Buddhist monks in
Myanmar, who now have much more potent tools for spreading incitement to
ethnic cleansing—fueling the fastest-
growing refugee crisis in the world.
The freedom of speech is an
important democratic value, but it’s not the only one. In the liberal
tradition, free speech is usually understood as a vehicle—a necessary
condition for achieving certain other societal ideals: for creating a
knowledgeable public; for engendering healthy, rational, and informed
debate; for holding powerful people and institutions accountable; for
keeping communities lively and vibrant. What we are seeing now is that
when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too
possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.
Creating
a knowledgeable public requires at least some workable signals that
distinguish truth from falsehood. Fostering a healthy, rational, and
informed debate in a mass society requires mechanisms that elevate
opposing viewpoints, preferably their best versions. To be clear, no
public sphere has ever fully achieved these ideal conditions—but at
least they were ideals to fail from. Today’s engagement algorithms, by
contrast, espouse no ideals about a healthy public sphere.
