By Gerald F. Seib and Christopher Mims
The Wall Street Journal Executive Washington Editor Gerald F.
Seib and Technology Columnist Christopher Mims held a live Q&A
chat Wednesday about the Facebook oversight board's decision on
Donald Trump's account ban. Here are edited excerpts:
Gerald F. Seib: Facebook's independent oversight board upheld
the company's decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from its
platform, and said the company's decision was justified. This means
that Mr. Trump will not regain his megaphone on Facebook or
Instagram for the foreseeable future. However, the oversight board
also ruled it was inappropriate for Facebook to indefinitely
suspend Mr. Trump, and gave the company six months to determine an
appropriate penalty for former President Trump and clearly outline
its policies for suspending influential users.
It seems to me that, yes, the president's Facebook page is going
to be suspended. But another way of looking at it is that the
company punted this sensitive issue to the oversight board and the
oversight board is now punting it back.
Christopher Mims: This is an instance of what some might call
malicious compliance. The Facebook oversight board is behaving
exactly as it was designed. Basically they said, "Hey, you don't
have laws or rules that cover the specific thing that you did,
which was a permanent ban. You need to establish those because our
entire remit is to evaluate whether or not you are following your
own rules." I think, explicitly, they created the oversight board
because they didn't want to have to make the final determination in
these matters, but now they do again.
Seib: Now that the hot potato is back in Facebook's hands, will
they now have to come up with some clear guidelines -- not just for
former President Trump but for political speech in general?
Mims: I think they will. Facebook is a technology company, and
they are always kind of winging it when it comes to these content
questions. All of the reporting The Wall Street Journal and others
have done about how these decisions are made internally -- it's a
messy process. So they are going to have to establish their
standards.
Seib: This is really important in the tech world. It's also
really important in the political world. The bigger megaphone for
then-President Trump -- now private-citizen Trump -- has been
Twitter. That's the platform from which he got the most reach for
whatever he had to say. But as a political tool, Facebook was
probably way more important to the Trump campaigns in 2016 and 2020
-- as a fundraising tool, as an organizing tool and as a
grassroots-motivating tool. I guarantee you the president's friends
down in Mar-a-Lago, the people who are thinking about his political
future along with him, were paying a lot of attention [to the
decision].
Mims: When I interviewed Brad Parscale, head of that strategy
for Trump before Trump was elected, his organization was really the
master of the small-dollar donations. That also makes a big
difference for candidates like Bernie Sanders, but for Trump, it
was absolutely essential. So even though Facebook only represented
maybe 35 or 40 million people out of his audience of 150 million
online -- and Twitter represented a much greater proportion --
Facebook was in some ways the more devastating blow.
Now, in terms of how the other platforms have to deal with this,
they have advantages and disadvantages. Twitter has made it
explicit that their decisions about this are not so much editorial,
but here are very explicit guidelines that they themselves are
setting and enforcing. It leaves anyone who objects to this ban in
an awkward position because traditionally small "c" conservatives
don't want to regulate businesses, especially not in the matter of
content. But it's at the point now where these platforms have to be
clear what sort of material they're going to allow and what they're
not going to. So I think that's why you have folks like Josh Hawley
saying we need to break these companies up.
Seib: Social-media companies are at a kind of inflection point
here. Are they publishing companies that want to assume the legal
responsibility of publishers? Or are they common carriers that have
to accept the regulation that common carriers put up with? Up till
now it seems to me they want to be both and neither at the same
time.
This is the sort of issue that forces them to a decision, but
it's being forced upon them in a very uncomfortable political
environment, particularly on the right. You've mentioned Josh
Hawley, you know, the [Republican] senator from Missouri who's been
basically on an anti-Big Tech jihad for a couple of years now, and
it's getting more intense. He has out now a new book, "The Tyranny
of Big Tech." He is essentially saying they're too big, they're too
monopolistic and harmful to free speech in this country. And this
is why today's ruling is particularly important.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted out, "A House
Republican majority will rein in Big Tech power over our speech."
So he's drawing a direct line between conservatives like Donald
Trump being censored by Facebook in their view and the Republican
Party setting out to regulate and dismantle Big Tech when they have
the power to do so.
Mims: He's saying, "We're going to take the House and if we do
and we have a president who will sign this legislation, that's how
we'll rein them in." I can't assess the likelihood of any of those
outcomes, but I can say that for now clearly there's going to be
paralysis. While regulating Big Tech is an issue with a great deal
of bipartisan support, Republicans and Democrats have completely
different sets of concerns. Republicans are much more concerned
about speech issues. Democrats seem to be much more concerned about
competition. And there doesn't seem to be much overlap in terms of
the kind of legislation that's been proposed.
Seib: I think that philosophically there is the potential for
some overlap because Democrats and progressives tend to be as
distrustful of big power, particularly big-business power, as
populists in the new Republican party are. The fact that there has
been this war between Donald Trump and social media has put that
off a little bit, but I think over time you could see left and
right come together.
One last thing I wanted to ask you was, there has been this talk
-- in Trump-world in particular -- about creating new social-media
companies. Parler is kind of out there already as a conservative
alternative to Twitter and Facebook. On the one hand, it's not that
hard probably to start your own social-media company. On the other
hand, it seems really hard. I'm not an industry expert, which is
why I'm asking you.
Mims: It is very easy to build a new social-media platform. It
is extraordinarily difficult to moderate a new social-media
platform. The internet automatically trends toward content that
will instantly get you banned from every app store, as happened to
Parler. Moderation is this incredibly challenging mountain of a
task that is not amenable to strictly automated solutions. Facebook
has all these elaborate systems for doing that, plus they have the
best AI scientists in the world working on that as well. For
Parler, for example, to try and match that is extraordinarily
difficult. It's harder than setting up a new television network --
and more expensive.
Seib: You know the reaction from Mar-a-Lago has shown that
President Trump is furious that he hasn't been given his Facebook
page back. But part of me thinks that today is actually making him
really happy in one way: Between this controversy and the
controversy in the House where Liz Cheney is about to be stripped
of her position as the number-three leader -- because she won't buy
into the Trump narrative about what happened in the 2020 election
-- has Donald Trump once again back where he likes to be, which is
at the center of controversy.
-- To hear the full conversation and listen to Jerry and
Christopher answer questions from the audience, check out the Live
Q&A page. And for more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice
and headlines, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com and Christopher
Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 06, 2021 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024