When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. And when a company tries to become the arbiter of truth—as Big Tech wants to become—it triggers a storm and finds itself in its eye. Such is the fate of Facebook. It is getting thrashed from both sides, the Right and the Left, and all over the world, in India and the West.
At the heart of the problem is Facebook’s decision to shield people from “harmful content.” For this purpose, in May it constituted an oversight board to purge anything harmful. The board comprised a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a former prime minister, a prominent journalist, and several experts of law, free speech, and digital rights.
It is an independent board, which can even nullify the decisions by the company and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. Rather grandly, Zuckerberg wrote that “there are times when people use their voice to endanger others. That’s why we have Community Standards to articulate what is and isn’t allowed on our platforms. When we enforce these policies, we follow a set of values—authenticity, safety, privacy, and dignity—guided by international human rights standards. Our commitment to free expression is paramount, but we still need to keep people safe and take down harmful content.” In short, he wants to do what James Bond has done many a time—save the world.
Zuckerberg’s sermonizing reeks of the duplicity of the Left; even the language is similar. Remember ‘We condemn terrorism but human rights violations cannot be ignored’, ‘9/11 is bad but so also is American imperialism’, ‘We support freedom of expression but the sentiments and sensibilities of minorities should be respected’, and long is the list of Leftist prevarications. ‘But’ always butts in. Ditto with Zuckerberg: “free expression is paramount, but…”
Quite apart from the fact that a lot of Facebook employees are Left-leaning, the board has also been accused of this bias. Only one of the 20 oversight board members is a genuine champion of free speech—John Samples, a vice president at America’s libertarian Cato Institute. Last year, he authored a report with a self-revealing title, ‘Why the government should not regulate content moderation of social media.’ It said: “Preventing harms caused by ‘fake news’ or ‘hate speech’ lies well beyond the jurisdiction of the government; tech firms appear determined to deal with such harms, leaving little for the government to do.”
But most Facebook oversight board members are Left-leaning and, therefore, intolerant. For instance, there is Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, the rabidly Leftist newspaper.
In other words, the oversight board is actually a censor board: censorship in a nice garb is still censorship.
Gagging the voice of others on whatever pretext—maintaining community standards, checking harmful content, whatever—is bad karma. And bad karma is never without comeuppance.
As mentioned earlier (https://indianarrative.com/india/facebook-plays-god-gets-battered-in-political-arena-9660.html), censorship leads to controversy, so Facebook has been dragged into the political arena. This severely hurts business prospects. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology has summoned its representatives to appear on September 2. The Lok Sabha Secretariat has issued a notice: “To hear the views of the representatives of Facebook on the subject ‘Safeguarding citizens’ rights and prevention of misuse of social/online news media platforms including special emphasis on women security in the digital space.”
Such are the perils of saving the world. James Bond can face the perils nonchalantly because he doesn’t have a company to run..
