To Fight Political Lies, Facebook’s Whole Business Model Has To Change

Speech is not the issue. Targeting is.

“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.” (2001: A Space Odyssey)

Here’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a widely panned speech at Georgetown:

We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.

This has generated some outrage, but there is something here. Let’s follow his logic and see where it leads. But first let’s clear out some bullshit.

Clearing Out The BS

Zuckerberg is lying about the reason that Facebook isn’t fact-checking ads. If they could they would. It’s just really really hard to do, especially at scale across multiple countries. What is politics? What is truth? If Facebook could do this at scale they would have built God-level AI and, mashallah they have not.

Second, he is also lying when he says we think ‘people should be able to see for themselves’. Facebook’s entire business model is built on micro-targeting. The whole point of Facebook people is that it’s not a billboard, you can choose who sees your ads. Politicians can run racist ads at racist people and normal ones at everyone else. By design, people cannot see for themselves.