A few weeks ago, I reserved a copy of A Storm of Swords, the third Song if Ice and Fire aka Game of Thrones book. That was far to difficult to say. It’s HBO’s fault. If they had titled the TV series the same as the book series, Song of Ice and Fire, instead of after the first book of the series we wouldn’t have this confusion. I missed the email saying the book was ready as it didn’t come from NYPL (New York Public Library) but from No Reply. It looked like spam. I figured the book had to be there, so I logged into my library account and saw it was ready. Good thing, today was the last day they would have held it. I love the way modern libraries work. Sure, I don’t have the pleasure of going through the shelves to find books I didn’t know I want to read, but I can find online every book in the entire system, which is huge. They have everything. The question now is how long will it take me to read a 1128-page book?
That’s how far I got yesterday. Since then I thought of something to write about and things have happened.
When I got home from the library, I was a dismayed to find that the book’s cover was coming off the binding, it’s a paperback. I considered going back to just let them know it wasn’t my doing. Instead I did what I would with one of my own books, I fixed it. My father taught me how to fix books as a kid and I’ve done it scores of times. A paperback is simple, I just used Elmer’s glue. Today you can’t even tell there was a problem.
Congratulations to the Nats for winning the world series. I feel bad for the Astros, they are a historically great team, by one measure the only team that was ever better was the 27 Yankees. Anything can happen in a short series.
Now on Facebook’s policy on political ads; they allow the advertisers to lie. This upsets many people, there are malicious and harmful lies being spread. Facebook says that they are just defending free speech. They have a point; do you really want Zuckerberg and his people being the arbiters of truth? While there are some things that are clearly lies there are others that are debatable, and where you draw the line between clearly and debatable, is, well, debatable.
Our jurisprudence and more importantly our concepts of free speech were formed under very different circumstances. We think of the guy on the soap box feeling free to say whatever he wants in Hyde Park or the town square. That’s the ideal. Then the town square got replaced by the privately-owned mall. We have still not fully adjusted to that, but the law did evolve. The owners of the malls are allowed to ban political speech, but not discriminate based on the content.
Now comes Facebook, which is Hyde Park scaled up beyond recognition, and we have to rethink everything. As is so often the case, things are far more complex than people want to admit. Facebook has a point, they provide the conduit, but not the content. Do we hold the phone company responsible for everything said on the phone? Can we really expect Facebook to vet every single post? Do we want them to vet every single post? I know I don’t want them to be able to prevent me linking to this blog.
That said, ads are different. I take out Facebook Ads and I have to wait for them to be approved. I understand Facebook’s reluctance to police political ads. No matter what they do they will be accused of being biased. The right accuses them all the time. There are bans on hate speech and there is more hate speech on the right then the left so yes, they will block more speech on the right than the left.
Facebook could do what malls and now twitter does and ban all political ads. Do you want your favorite little-known politician or cause that doesn’t have the money to spend on TV ads to not have a voice?
There are a few ways we can go. We can treat Facebook as a utility. We don’t really have the option of moving to another platform, because what makes Facebook special is not its design or its policies, it’s that everyone is on it. When I meet someone new that I want to keep in contact with I ask if he or she is on Facebook. I don’t want to give that up, just as I don’t want to give up on having a telephone or electricity. When people don’t have a choice of provider, we call it a public utility. It’s not quite public and not quite private. The government has more control than over the typical private entity. It’s one route we can go.
Facebook can try to prevent that by coming up with their own independent monitor. How about a non-profit social media standards commission? A consortium of journalism schools can set it up. There would be a hell of a fight on who is included. The right would scream if Breidbart wasn’t included while I would scream if they were.
The best solutions might be totally independent of Facebook. How about using our libel laws? If an ad is taken out falsely saying that Biden paid billions to Ukraine the people that took the ad out should be sued and put out of business.
The most effective thing is for the Facebook users to become better information consumers. Don’t post things that you have no vetted that don’t come from reputable sources. Remember that reputable doesn’t mean agreeing with you. Give more respect to the mainstream media, they aren’t always right, and they might not share your priorities, but the truth IS a priority for them. When the New York Times makes a mistake, they admit it and work on preventing it happening again. They have a reputation to maintain.
The tough part is being willing to criticize your friends for spreading disinformation. I know that’s difficult. They take is as a personal attack. What I most often do is not directly confront the person but make a post of my own pointing out the truth. I don’t know how to best accomplish it, but we need to make it socially unacceptable to spread lies and half-truths. That means even when you agree with the politics of those spreading them.
Social media is new and perhaps new norms of behavior will develop to deal with it. In the end that’s the only thing that will work.
Wise Madness 