Platforms Must Pay for Their Role in the Insurrection

Authored by wired.com and submitted by AmericasComic

President Trump and his enablers in government and right-wing media will shoulder the blame for Wednesday’s insurrection at the US Capitol, but internet platforms—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, in particular—have played a fomenting and facilitating role that no one should overlook.

In their relentless pursuit of engagement and profits, these platforms created algorithms that amplify hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This harmful content is particularly engaging and serves as the lubricant for businesses as profitable as they are influential. These platforms also enforce their terms of service in ways that favor extreme speech and behavior, predominantly right-wing extremism.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Roger McNamee (@Moonalice) is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He spent 34 years as a technology investor and was an early investor in Facebook and an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg.

Since 2015, when Trump announced his presidential campaign, the relationship between internet platforms and the political right has been increasingly symbiotic. The business choices of internet platforms have enabled an explosion not only of white supremacy but also of Covid denial and antivax extremism, which have variously undermined the nation’s pandemic response, nearly sabotaged the presidential election, and played a foundational role in the violence at the Capitol. A huge industry has evolved on the platform giants to raise money from and sell products to people in the thrall of extreme ideologies.

The platforms hide behind the First Amendment to justify their policies, claiming that they do not want to be arbiters of truth. There are two flaws in this argument. First, no thoughtful critic wants any platform to act as a censor. Second, the algorithmic amplification of extreme content is a business choice made in pursuit of profit; eliminating it would reduce the harm from hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories without any limitation on free speech. Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory made this point in a WIRED essay titled “Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach.”

Until this insurrection, many policymakers and pundits have dismissed the rising tide of online extremism, believing it to be safely contained and therefore harmless. Their lack of concern allowed extremism’s audience and intensity to multiply.

Because internet platforms play a dominant role in our national conversation, extremism cultivated online seeped into the real world. We saw evidence earlier this year when white supremacists occupied the Michigan state capitol and then rioted in Minneapolis, Louisville, Portland, and Kenosha after the murder of George Floyd. Internet platforms, Facebook in particular, were central to organizing these violent acts, as well as in Washington, DC, yesterday. Journalists have uncovered police members in Facebook Groups devoted to a variety of right-wing extremist ideas, which may explain why police departments in some cities have not taken the threat of right-wing extremism seriously. Press and online videos have depicted police officers standing by as insurrectionists broke the law, or even taking selfies with them.

The violence on January 6 followed a rally where the president incited the crowd to march to Capitol Hill and “show strength.” The rally was organized and livestreamed on every major internet platform, which also amplified photos and videos posted during the day. Twitter and Facebook both allowed Trump to post an inflammatory video about the mob violence and only took it down after a tsunami of negative feedback. Twitter suspended Trump’s account for 12 hours and Facebook did so indefinitely—likely due to pressure from employees and policymakers—but irreversible damage had been done.

The scale of internet platforms is such that their mistakes can undermine democracy, public health, and public safety even in countries as large as the United States. Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it. Facebook has also acknowledged that pages and groups associated with QAnon extremism had at least 3 million members, meaning Facebook helped radicalize 2 million people. Over the past six months, QAnon subsumed MAGA and the antivax movement, with a major assist from the platforms and policies of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. The recording of President Trump's recent conversation with Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, confirmed that Trump has joined his followers in embracing QAnon and its conspiracy theories.

Congress and law enforcement must decide what to do about the unprecedented insurrection in Washington. President Trump and elements of the right-wing media must pay. So, too, must internet platforms. They have prioritized their own profits and prerogatives over democracy and the public health and safety of the people who use their products. It is no exaggeration to say that internet platforms, as well as new technologies like artificial intelligence and smart devices, are unsafe. They are very often created by people who have no incentive to anticipate, much less prevent, harms. As things stand, the incentives have encouraged the development of a predatory ecosystem, with platforms, users, and politicians alike in on the grift.

Zodiac988 on January 8th, 2021 at 09:28 UTC »

This is a real slippery slope to walk. I know SOMETHING must be done. I've been in IT and watched the internet become what it is today.

While it can be used for horrible things it is the GREATEST tool for learning, expression and speech the human race has ever created.

We must hold those who wish to invite violence and extremism accountable but we must also safeguard our fountain of knowledge at all costs.

bw57570 on January 8th, 2021 at 05:52 UTC »

Yes platforms like Facebook and Twitter are garbage. But worse than that are the garbage news sites like Kenneth Copeland's "Victory Channel" that dupe viewers with obvious lies to manipulate them into following the extreme right agenda.

Thatguy755 on January 8th, 2021 at 04:10 UTC »

Facebook is trash. If they get rid of all the fake news, propaganda, and hate speech it will be nothing but minions memes.