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A former digital strategist for Barack Obama has demanded an end to big tech’s profit-driven optimization of outrage and called for regulators to curb online disinformation and division.
Michael Slaby – author of a new book, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life – described tech giants Facebook and Google as “two gorillas” crushing the very creativity needed to combat conspiracy theories spread by former US president Donald Trump and others.
“The systems are not broken,” Slaby, 43, told the Guardian by phone from his home in Rhinebeck, New York. “They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers. They can be designed differently. We can express and encourage a different set of public values about the public goods that we need from our public sphere.”
Facebook has almost 2.8 billion global monthly active users with a total of 3.3 billion using any of the company’s core products – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – on a monthly basis. Its revenue in the fourth quarter of last year was $28bn, up 33% from a year earlier, and profits climbed 53% to $11.2bn.
The first amendment is about government suppression of speech; it doesn’t have anything to do with your access to Facebook
But the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of poisoning the information well. Critics say it polarises users and allows hate speech and conspiracy theories to thrive, and that people who join extremist groups are often directed by the platform’s algorithm. The use of Facebook by Trump supporters involved in the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has drawn much scrutiny.
Slaby believes Facebook and Twitter were too slow to remove Trump from their platforms. “This is where I think they hide behind arguments like the first amendment,” he said. “The first amendment is about government suppression of speech; it doesn’t have anything to do with your access to Facebook.
“They don’t want to constrain free expression for economic reasons and so there’s a very cynical view: yeah, sure, they kicked President Trump off right before President Biden’s inauguration after they’d made all the money they possibly could on it and he was going to be less influential.
“He had been lying and promoting misinformation for a long time before that, knowingly. Could they have made that choice earlier? Yes. Was that choice very hard because he was an elected leader of the most powerful democracy in the world? Yes, that’s a really hard choice, like a crazy Faustian bargain.
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“But this is a place where the fact that they were alone as private entities, having to think about how to make this choice with no public moral leadership or regulatory framework to help them, is actually a big problem. This is a purely private decision over a very public sphere. That’s a problem – but something we can fix.”
Slaby calls for a combination of moral leadership, public advocacy, engagement by politicians, new regulatory frameworks and collective action by users to rein in a few private companies that currently wield massive influence over the public sphere.
Slaby was the Obama election campaign’s chief technology officer in 2008 and chief integration and innovation officer in 2012. Their revolutionary approach to online organizing helped secure two presidential election victories. It was an optimistic era when Democrats enjoyed a warm relationship with Facebook and Google and social media seemed to promise community, democratization and a diversity of voices.
Slaby, whose book examines how the tech revolution instead undermined civic life, commented: “My experience of leaders inside Facebook is that many of them are smart, well-intentioned people that recognize the systems aren’t perfect and they need to change. They are inside an economic system that is not incentivized for them to get healthier and that’s tricky. They’re not a B-Corp [a firm certified for its social and environmental performance]. They are a for-profit company with shareholders that demand they are optimized for profit.
“It is not always easy for even the best actors inside Facebook to make good choices. Now, that said, they make a lot of choices that look good publicly but don’t really move the needle in terms of the basic mechanisms of attention and outrage inside the system. What is really needed are some fundamental redesigns about how we engage with each other and what these systems are optimized for if we’re really going to reclaim a healthy civic discourse.”
Facebook’s defenders are sure to object to heavy-handed government intervention. But regulation now seems unavoidable.
The answer ultimately is about transparency, visibility into how we are making choices, the ability to unmake choices, especially like algorithmic decisions
Slaby contends: “We can’t do nothing. What we are doing is not working for us. There is a valid concern around government censorship becoming the dictator of what is valid – the tyranny of the majority – but that has also been used as a justification for perpetuating racism in America since the first fucking day of this country. So we also have to be attuned to what are we protecting.
“The answer ultimately is about transparency, visibility into how we are making choices, the ability to unmake choices, especially like algorithmic decisions, and having a meaningful public dialogue that helps to express a values-based moral framework for considering how we want civic discourse to function. It is about a public declaration that is then enforced and codified in regulation – but isn’t just about President Biden telling me what to believe because I don’t want that either.”
Earlier this month Senator Amy Klobuchar unveiled legislation to update antitrust laws, empower regulatory bodies and allow greater competition to big tech. The need to confront and check the power of companies such as Facebook and Google is a rare area of bipartisan agreement. Slaby believes that it is essential.
“It’s not just about power and control, it’s also about innovation,” he said. “We live in a world where creativity and innovation is dramatically lessened because of the weight and power of these two gorillas.”
Conspiracy theories are not new but they have been supercharged by social media with the antisemitic QAnon movement, identified by the FBI as potential domestic terror threat, among the most notorious examples. QAnon’s acolytes were visible at Trump campaign rallies and the US Capitol riot. But Slaby warns against any sweeping demonization.
“I don’t think we can paint like the entire movement and anybody who’s ever been ‘QAnon curious’ with the same brush. Those people are looking for something and we need to be honest about what is it they’re looking for.
“And by the way, what are they not getting from other leadership or other political institutions or other cultural or civic or social institutions that they’re getting there? How are we failing to provide people with a sense of belonging and safety that leaves them searching and susceptible to being exploited and misled?”
You can’t start with, ‘You’re crazy and stupid,’ and then say. ‘But we want to be friends’
One of Biden’s biggest challenges is how to bridge the divide and reach the millions who bought into Trump’s election lies or QAnon or other conspiracy theories. Slaby, now chief strategist of the not-for-profit Harmony Labs, suggested: “It starts by not calling them all stupid. You can’t start with, ‘You’re crazy and stupid,’ and then say. ‘But we want to be friends.’ That’s just not going to work.
“I agree with the reality that you hear on the left of, ‘We don’t want to unify with white supremacy’. That’s why I say we need to call out genuine extremism, but call in the people who are getting caught up in something that they didn’t understand or didn’t mean to be part of.
“That distinction is tough but ultimately for the Biden administration and the left more broadly that’s about not getting into an argument about QAnon but articulating a vision for the future that gives people this sense of belonging and safety and solves this problem of futurelessness, that gives people a reason to be part of something else.”
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