Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is America’s Most Powerful Unelected Man


On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s “New Steps to Protect America’s Elections.” They include blocking new political ads in the week leading up to Election Day and attaching tags to posts that contain misinformation, specifically related to the coronavirus, and posts by politicians declaring victory before all results are counted.

One can – and many will – debate how effective these measures will be in preventing chaos on election night during a pandemic. (So ​​far, Facebook’s “misleading post” tags are vague to the point of causing additional confusion for voters. Similarly, blocking new political ads a week before the vote ignores the large amount of misinformation to which they Americans are subject year after year). It seems beyond debate how deeply Facebook has woven itself into the fabric of democracy.


Reading Zuckerberg’s election security blog post reminded me of a line from a landmark 2017 article by journalist Max Read. Three years ago, Read received a similar promise from Zuckerberg to “guarantee the integrity” of the German elections. The commitment was admirable, he wrote, but also a tacit admission of Facebook’s immense power. “It is a declaration that Facebook is assuming a level of power both from the state and beyond it, as a sovereign, self-regulating supra-state entity, within which the states themselves operate.”

That power is consolidated in the decisions of its chief executive, who has voting control over the company. Here’s how Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes described Zuckerberg’s iron grip on the company in The Times last year:

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. It controls three core communications platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which are used by billions of people every day. Facebook’s board functions more like an advisory committee than a supervisor, because Mark controls about 60% of the voting shares. Only Mark can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use, and even what messages are delivered. He sets the rules on how to distinguish violent and inflammatory speech from merely offensive speech, and can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

If Hughes’s description seems hyperbolic, it may be because such consolidation of power is really difficult to understand.

“I think we constantly underestimate the power of Facebook,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, told me. “It’s really difficult for humans to imagine the actual size and influence of the platform. Something like 1 in 3 people use it, it is unlike anything we have found in the history of mankind. And I’m not sure Mark Zuckerberg is even willing to contemplate his influence. I’m not sure I’d ever sleep if I ever thought about how much power she has. “

The power of Facebook is now self-perpetuating. This week provided a great example. On Tuesday, Facebook and other platforms revealed a sting operation run by the Kremlin-backed Internet Investigation Agency to sow division ahead of the presidential election by creating a network of fake user accounts and websites. This time, however, the agency unwittingly hired freelance American journalists to create the content.

There is a dark circle of life in this news. Facebook’s unprecedented growth and control of the digital advertising market, along with Google and others, helped accelerate the collapse of journalism’s broken business models. This led to consolidation, the closure of publications and the dismissal of journalists everywhere. Facebook’s dominance of news and mercurial distribution algorithms led to an increase in hyperpartisan pages and websites to fill in the gaps and capitalize on the platform’s ability to monetize engagement, which in turn led to excess misinformation. viral and misinformation that Facebook has been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to adequately monitor.

This free for all has made Facebook the platform of choice for political manipulation. Those bad actors are now hiring and exploiting the same freelance journalists displaced by the collapse of the media industry that Facebook helped accelerate. Finally, Facebook takes steps to eliminate bad actors, assuring the country of its commitment to democracy and consolidating its role as protector of free and fair elections.

Facebook wins in all directions. Its size and power creates instability, the response of which, according to Facebook, is to give the company additional authority.

This cycle is unsustainable. This summer has shown that the platform has been a major vector of the most destabilizing forces in American life. He has helped fuel conspiracies around the dangerous QAnon movement. It has provided organization and expanded calls to action from militia movements, which have been linked to deaths in American cities during protests. Its policies of restraint have failed to detect flagrant violations of the rules around the disenfranchisement of voters, and conspiracy theories that go viral on the platform have, time and again, reached the mouth of the President Donald Trump.

Facebook employees seem to understand that the situation is untenable and are speaking internally against Zuckerberg’s leadership. “He seems truly incapable of taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions at Facebook,” a Facebook employee told BuzzFeed News last week after a company meeting in response to the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

With only two months to go, the nation’s focus is on the integrity of the electoral process. With the president threatening to undermine the election results, the stakes cannot be higher. As Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday, “We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy.”

But what says that one of those institutions charged with protecting democracy is, in itself, structured more like a dictatorship?

“Facebook had become too big and its users too complacent for democracy,” Read concluded at the end of his 2017 article. His words feel prophetic today, as Facebook, without government control or regulation, it is positioned as the main line of defense to protect these institutions.

At first, Zuckerberg’s recent election promise can be reassuring (Someone! Doing something!). But his plan is the admission of a great power that should make Americans uncomfortable. In our quest to defend ourselves from the power of a strong man in a kingdom, we must not allow a stronger man to seize the power of another.

Charlie Warzel c. 2020 The New York Times Company

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