WIn June, I wrote a column under the heading: “A man stands between Joe Biden and the presidency of the United States: Mark Zuckerberg.” Trump, raging against the pandemic at the time, was following Biden in the polls, just as in 2016 he had been following Hillary Clinton. And yet, we know what happened in November: The Trump team made inspired use of Facebook’s targeting engine to suppress Democratic engagement in key states, and it worked. Perhaps less well-known is that Facebook offered to “embed” employees for free in both candidates’ campaign offices to help them use the platform effectively. The Clinton campaign rejected the offer. Trump’s crowd agreed, and Facebook employees helped her campaign craft the messages that may have closed the election.
So here we are in 2020, 100 days from the presidential election. Trump still follows Biden. But its base of support has remained solid. So the point I made in June still stands: If you want to win a second term, Facebook will be your only hope, so your campaign is betting on the ranch. And if Facebook suddenly decided that it would not allow its platform to be used by any of the campaigns in the period between now and November 3, Trump would be a one-term president, free to spend even more time with his shopping cart. golf, and maybe his lawyers.
For Facebook, read Zuckerberg, for Facebook it’s not just a corporate extension of its founder’s personality, but his personal toy. I can’t think of any other technology founder who has retained such tight control over his creation through his ownership of a special class of stock, giving him full control. The passage in the company’s SEC filing detailing this is a surreal reading. He says that Zuckerberg “has the ability to control the outcome of matters presented to our shareholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer or avoiding a change in control, merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other shareholders support, or vice versa, this concentrated control could result in the consummation of a transaction that our other shareholders do not support. “
Such a concentration of power in the hands of a single individual would be a concern in any company, but in a global company that effectively controls and mediates much of the global public sphere it is clearly shocking. This impression is vividly reinforced every time Zuckerberg has to make a public appearance, especially when he has to wear a suit, as he did when he appeared before the US Congress in April 2018. On such occasions he may look like a doll. tailor, a man whose sense of humor has been surgically removed at birth.
This cartoon, Evan Osnos wrote in an absorber New Yorker Profile is that of an automaton with little regard for the human dimensions of his work. “The truth is something else: a long time ago you decided that no historical change is painless. I like it [the emperor] Augustus, he is at peace with his compensation. Between the speech and the truth, he chose the speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and security, he chose scale. His life so far has convinced him that he can solve ‘problem after problem after problem,’ regardless of the public howl it may cause. ”
People who have dealt with or worked with Zuckerberg come up with different images of him, but everyone seems to agree that he is a kind of hyperrationalist. When he comes across a theory that doesn’t agree with his, says Osnos, who spent some time with him, “he finds a big disagreement (a fact, a methodology, a premise) and criticizes it. It is an effective technique to gain arguments, but it makes it difficult to introduce new information. Over time, some former colleagues say, his MPs have begun to filter out the bad news from the presentations before they reach him. ”
One of the great puzzles about Zuckerberg is how such an apparently brilliant individual can be so ignorant about how cultures and societies work. In February 2017, for example, he published a 5,500-word manifesto on Building global community. It began: “History is the story of how we have learned to unite in ever-increasing numbers, from tribes to cities and nations. At every step, we create social infrastructure like communities, media, and governments to empower ourselves to accomplish things that we couldn’t do on our own.
Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global, such as spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our biggest challenges also need global responses, such as ending terrorism, fighting climate change and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity to unite, not only as cities or nations, but also as a global community. “
There is much more in that empty vein. Apparently, the solution to the world’s problems was to have everyone in the world as members of the Facebook “community” (a favorite term for Zuckerberg). When I showed this essay to a colleague who teaches politics (and who until now was happily unaware of Zuckerberg) he read it with growing disbelief. “If a freshman had presented this,” he commented, “I would have sent it home.” The idea that the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful corporations could write such a talk struck him as surprising.
It is. But we are where we are. And there is another contemporary dimension to the puzzle, namely that the company Zuckerberg controls seems to have the power to influence people’s behavior in politically relevant ways. We have empirical evidence for this. In 2014, for example, a massive experiment on 689,000 Facebook users showed that emotional states can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. And in the 2010 midterm elections in the US, a Facebook campaign to increase voter turnout, conducted by researchers who conducted an experiment with 61 million users, estimated that an additional 340,000 people turned out to vote. due to only one election day Facebook Message
In themselves, these experiments may seem innocuous (although the “emotional contagion” study raised some ethical concerns). After all, encouraging people to go out and vote is admirable. However, the real importance of the experiments was their indication that Facebook had the ability to influence people’s behavior and emotions in ways that could possibly have a political impact. Which leads to the question of whether Facebook could, if its corporate interests required it, put a thumbs up on electoral scales on marginal seats.
Even in the hyperpolarized world of contemporary American politics, that seems unlikely. But that has not stopped people from scrutinizing Zuckerberg’s recent statements and behavior regarding Trump. When Twitter took the unprecedented step of tagging some of the president’s most incendiary tweets, and Trump threatened to revoke the immunity offered to social media platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which should appear in the The president’s favorite news channel, but Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “private companies shouldn’t be the arbiters of the truth”? And then there were the two visits Zuckerberg made to the White House in September and October of last year. There is no smoke without fire, and all that.
These could simply be signs of a corporate boss trying to stay out of trouble with the day-to-day government. But it still raises an intriguing question: Is it conceivable that Zuckerberg would prefer a Trump victory to a Biden victory? The answer may depend on who Biden chooses as his running mate. If I chose Elizabeth Warren, for example, I suppose the ad targeting system and Facebook experience would be available to Trump, possibly at a discount. Why? In a leaked recording of an internal Facebook discussion, Zuckerberg described Warren’s antitrust policy proposals as “an existential threat” to her company. And, as the famous General de Gaulle observed from the nations, tech companies have no friends, only interests. Zuckerberg understands this as well as anyone. And it will govern its decisions in the coming months.
