Nowhere was this shift more pronounced than on Facebook, which for years envisioned itself as a kind of post-human communication platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, often spoke about his philosophy of “freckles” design – making things as simple as possible for users. The other executives I spoke to believe that eventually, Facebook will become a kind of self-polishing machine, artificial intelligence does most of the dirty work and humans intervene as little as possible.
But in the run-up to the 2020 election, Facebook went in the opposite direction. It put in place a new, cumbersome approval process for political advertisers, and blocked new political ads in the post-election period. He tampered with false claims, and put in place a “wireless circuit-breaker” to give fact-checkers time to evaluate suspicious stories. And to reduce the likelihood of violent unrest, it temporarily discontinues its recommendation algorithm for certain types of private groups. (On Thursday, The New York Times reported that other temporary measures are being taken to print election-related misinformation, including adding more friction to the election-sharing process.)
All of these changes could, in fact, make Facebook more secure. But it also includes dialing many features for the growth of the platform over the years. It is an act of self-awareness, as if Ferrari had realized that he could only prevent his car from crashing by replacing the engine with go-kart motors.
“If you look at Facebook’s election response, there was a lot of traffic and attention to these people-curated centers,” said Eli Pariser, a longtime media executive and activist working on Civic Signals. Which is trying to re-imagine social media as a public space. “It’s a sign that ultimately, when you have really important information, there’s no substitute for human judgment.”
Twitter, another platform that has spent years trying to make communications as frictionless as possible, has tried to pump the brakes most of the time over the last four years. It will bring in more moderators, improve its rules, and put more human oversight on features like trending topics. In the months leading up to the election, it banned political advertisements, and shared features on tweets containing misleading information about the election results, including some from the president’s account.
