THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 55
platform’s rules do not prohibit lying, at
least not when politicians do it.
In October, Zuckerberg appeared be-
fore the House Financial Services Com-
mittee. Representative Alexandria Oca-
sio-Cortez questioned him. “I just want
to know how far I can push this,” she
said. “Could I pay to target predominantly
black Zip Codes and advertise them the
incorrect election date?” In the ensuing
back-and-forth, Zuckerberg clarified that
this particular lie is prohibited on Face-
book, but that most other lies are not.
Around the time of this testimony,
hundreds of Zuckerberg’s employees
signed an open letter. “We strongly ob-
ject to this policy as it stands,” the let-
ter read. “It doesn’t protect voices, but
instead allows politicians to weaponize
our platform.” The employees suggested
six policy changes, all relatively narrow
and easy to implement, including “Stron-
ger visual design treatment for political
ads,” “Restrict targeting for political ads,”
“Spend caps for individual politicians.”
Facebook took none of these sugges-
tions. Instead, the company announced
that it would “expand transparency,” in-
cluding by adding more search features
to the Ad Library.
Soon after, Elizabeth Warren’s Pres-
idential campaign ran a Facebook ad.
“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and
Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump
for re-election,” the ad claimed. It was
a deliberate provocation—a bit of fake
news meant to protest fake news. The
ad went on to clarify that the eye-grab-
bing claim was false, then continued:
“It’s time to hold Mark Zuckerberg ac-
countable—add your name if you agree.”
The stunt garnered some good P.R. for
the Warren campaign; it also enabled
her to collect the e-mail addresses of
many new supporters.
“There are people on every campaign,
in both parties, who know how to use all
these tricks,” Colin Delany, the digital
consultant, told me. “When campaigns
decide not to do something—whether
that something is microtargeting, or so-
called dark posts, or whether it’s outright
lies or racism—they’re making a strate-
gic choice.”
“It’s lovely that Democratic cam-
paigns are so principled,” Tara Mc-
Gowan, of Acronym, said. “I mean that
sincerely. And yet it also scares the shit
out of me, because the other side isn’t
playing by the same rules, and our prin-
ciples might make it all but impossible
for us to regain power.”
A few of the most obvious loopholes
were closed after 2016—it’s no longer
possible, for example, to purchase a Face-
book ad about an American political can-
didate using rubles—but many of the
bigger ones remain. Yaël Eisenstat, for-
merly Facebook’s head of elections-in-
tegrity operations for polit-
ical advertising, is now a
visiting fellow at Cornell.
“There’s a lot they could do
to protect the integrity of
the platform,” she told me.
“They could label paid con-
tent as paid, even after peo-
ple start to share it, which
they don’t consistently do.
They could put a label on
every political ad—‘This ad
has not been fact-checked’—which might
encourage some skepticism.” Still, polit-
ical ads make up only a tiny percentage
of Facebook’s content and less than a per
cent of its revenue. It would be much
more difficult to fact-check everything
that gets posted by every Facebook user,
from high schoolers to the President. Ei-
senstat added, “If the larger goal is to
have these platforms contribute to a
healthier public square, to leave democ-
racy healthier than they found it, then
this is just the low-hanging fruit.” In De-
cember, 2016, an internal Facebook ini-
tiative called Project P—for “propa-
ganda”—found dozens of right-wing
pages peddling fake news. According to
a recent Washington Post investigation,
Joel Kaplan, an executive at the company
who previously worked in the George W.
Bush White House, objected to remov-
ing all the propaganda, “because it will
disproportionately affect conservatives.”
On December 30, 2019, Andrew Bos-
worth, a top executive at Facebook and
a longtime friend of Zuckerberg’s, posted
a twenty-five-hundred-word “essay” on
a private social network for Facebook
employees. The text—by turns contrite
and defiant, laden with carefully selected
statistics and dubious allusions to J. R. R.
Tolkien and John Rawls—was later
leaked to the Times. Its central premise
was that social media may be poison-
ous, but ingesting poison is a matter of
personal choice. This was a long way
from the idealistic posture of Facebook’sofficial mission statement, “To give peo-
ple the power to build community and
bring the world closer together.” “If I
want to eat sugar and die an early death
that is a valid position,” Bosworth wrote.
“My grandfather took such a stance to-
wards bacon and I admired him for it.
And social media is likely much less
fatal than bacon.” Bosworth also asked
whether Facebook was “responsible
for Donald Trump getting
elected.” He concluded, “Yes,
but not for the reasons any-
one thinks. He didn’t get
elected because of Russia or
misinformation or Cam-
bridge Analytica. He got
elected because he ran the
single best digital ad cam-
paign I’ve ever seen.” Of
course, what’s best for a po-
litical campaign, or for a
company’s bottom line, is not always
what’s best for the health of a nation.
“No one ever complained about Face-
book for a single day until Donald Trump
was President,” Brad Parscale has said.
When the Obama campaign used Face-
book in new and innovative ways, the
media “called them geniuses.” When
Parscale did the same, he continued, he
was treated as “the evil of earth.” De-
spite the bombast and the false equiva-
lence, this is basically true. Some of the
public anxiety over Facebook is a re-
sponse to how easily it can be abused,
but much of that anxiety is about the
outcomes the platform yields when it’s
working as designed. Even leaving aside
the Cambridge Analytica data breach
and the allegations of foreign interfer-
ence—even if nobody had ever violated
any platform’s terms of service—many
of the fundamental problems of social
media still remain. Creepy surveillance,
dissolution of civic norms, widening un-
ease, infectious rage, a tilt toward autoc-
racy in several formerly placid liberal de-
mocracies—these are starting to seem
like inherent features, not bugs. The real
scandal is not that the system can be
breached; the real scandal is the system
itself. In a sense, it’s almost comforting
to imagine that the only bad actors on
social media are Russian state assets,
clickbait profiteers, and rogue political
consultants who violate the law. If that
were the extent of the problem, the prob-
lem could surely be contained.