Eric Wilson was the digital media guru behind both of Ed Gillespie’s statewide campaigns in Virginia, as well as part of the brain trust for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016.
His complaints about Facebook’s latitude when it come to data manipulation and information warfare (is there any other word choice?) is made prescient by one simple vignette, per Politico:
For weeks, while this inaccurate headline was promoted to voters, misrepresenting Gillespie’s position on a hot-button issue via Facebook ads, I was told by members of Facebook’s U.S. Politics & Government Outreachteam that nothing could be done. Finally, on March 21, 2017, when a reporter from The Associated Press contacted Facebook, the company decided that the post “violated Facebook’s terms of not doing ‘anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.’” To my knowledge, Facebook never returned the money it received for the ads that violated its own policies.
The most frustrating aspect of dealing with Facebook is its infuriating inconsistency. The platform’s terms of service are a sledgehammer when it needs it, but company executives apply them sparingly and without any clear consistency. Only when Facebook is confronted with the possibility of public scrutiny and bad coverage will it take action to do the right thing.
Having watched this instance from the outside, Gillespie’s team were not the only set of human being instantly perplexed at both the speed of misinformation but the unwillingness of outsiders to correct it.
Of course, this program of correcting “bad speech” gets into the ins-and-outs of “who decides?” — not least of which being that the inevitable crackdown ensnared many a worthwhile conservative perspective, while many liberal outlets continued to enjoy a hearing — all having learned from Obama For America how to game Facebook long before Cambridge Analytica attempted to do likewise four years later.
Yet Facebook is merely a medium, not a referee. True, there is a modicum of responsibility that viewpoints — and especially honest ones — should be entitled to their day in the sun.
Conservative media outlets have struggled to get that sunlight in an era of institutional morass and legacy media prejudice (e.g. the most conservative person the Washington Post can find to “balance” their newspaper is none other than Jennifer Rubin, a moderate’s moderate if ever there was one — though an honest moderate).
Facebook offers a medium that enables a good number of people to break through the old gatekeepers and speak directly to the masses. For those of us who are simply trying to get a perspective out, the grand social experiment of the Internet has been a colossal win. Yet for those who have weaponized information warfare — marketers, psychologists, foreign governments, and anyone looking to squeeze a dime out of another soul — the dangers of a lack of resiliency among the masses is a concern that bounces off of a single maxim: technology is exponential, culture is incremental.
So long as technology is wedded to Moore’s Law, culture will continue to struggle to keep up, creating easy prey for the technorati who understand the new rules.
How to solve the problem? One grand solution would be to trust information sources that are reliable in viewpoint as well as scope. Yet even then, it is incredibly easy to slander a viewpoint as “paid” or “liberal” or insufficiently orthodox — as common people do. Yet the overarching problem of a world plugged in to all sorts of EULAs and data sharing agreements has an even simpler solution — unplug from social media altogether.
This has its ups and downs as well. Folks prefer to be in the know, and life can come at folks fast. Yet what is important to remember in all of this is that Facebook — and whatever comes next — is merely a medium of exchange, not an adversary to values.
If we have a problem with Facebook, it’s not in the folks who are selling memes or thoughts… rather, perhaps our own inclinations to trust everything we read bounce off of our cynical natures and the result is… well, what you have today.
Caveat lector, my friends.
