But for Facebook, it is. Sure, the company tries to hide this greed
behind an enlightened attitude. But basically it’s the same MO as the
other winners in the tech economy, and certainly the rest of the Four—
foster a progressive brand among leadership, embrace
multiculturalism, run the whole place on renewable energy—but,
meanwhile, pursue a Darwinian, rapacious path to profits and ignore
the job destruction taking place at your hands every day.
Don’t kid yourself: Facebook’s sole mission is to make money.
Once the company’s success is measured in clicks and dollars, why
favor true stories over false ones? Just hire a few “media watchdog”
firms to give you cover. As far as the machine sees it, one click = one
click. So, entire editorial operations hatch all over the world to
optimize production to this Facebook machine. They create crazy fake
stories that serve as clickbait for the left and the right.
Pizza Gate—the story about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in
Washington, D.C.—got a lot of momentum around the 2016 election. It
claimed that the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign
manager, was running a child prostitution ring in the back rooms,
hidden from where the customers eat. Lots of people believed it. One
guy drove up from North Carolina with an assault rifle, with vague
ideas of freeing the imprisoned and abused children he’d read about.
He went into the restaurant and fired a shot, though without hurting
anyone (this time), and was arrested.^34
The shit sandwich here is that having legitimate news next to fake
news has only made the Facebook platform more dangerous. When
standing in line at Kroger, you may suspect Hillary is not an alien,
despite what the Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids tell you.
However, the presence of the New York Times and WaPo on Facebook
has legitimized fake news.
Platform
How can Facebook exert some form of editorial control? A good place
to start is with hate crimes. It’s easy to be on the right side of that one.
And numerically, the number of people who want to commit hate
crimes is not that high. Facebook will raise its hand and say, “No more