Lori Rasmussen

I signed up for Facebook sometime around 2008. I had been a MySpace user until then and had curated an enjoyable presence on that platform, but it was becoming more and more apparent that my friends and family were migrating en masse to Facebook. I don’t like to be the last one to leave the party, so I went over to Facebook too. I don’t remember if I ever really looked at the Terms of Service; rather like most of us, I clicked accept and got started.

It was fairly apparent right away that Facebook was very different than MySpace, not only interms of the user experience, but in how people connected and engaged. The way the site connected with me seemed different too. Goodbye MySpace Tom, hello Mark Zuckerberg, who was already a billionaire by the time I joined. Everyone was asking the same question: how can Facebook be making all this money off this free service? I read an article very early on that really stuck with me. I don’t recall the title or author, but the theme was basically this – look around. If you are using somebody else’s service for free and they aren’t trying to sell you a product, it means YOU are the product that is being bought and sold. And that was utterly true. Facebook’s monetary value rested in the size of its audience and its potential to connect marketers to me and all my friends and connections.

So even though I hadn’t read the terms and conditions, I felt fairly savvy about the fact that I knew I was being used in a way. However, the power that Facebook gave me to connect with people gave it value to me as well, so I engaged. I even set up a Facebook presence that still exists for my then-employer, a public TV station, so we could connect socially and share our digital content with our audience.

Facebook continued to grow of course, and with more and more media outlets beginning to use it, I, like an ever growing number of others, began getting the bulk of my news from my social media feed rather than through traditional channels. I haven’t watched a local TV newscast in literally years – assuming that if a story was impactful enough it would show up in my newsfeed. This trend of course echoes precisely what we have seen in the Pew Reports that show the growth of that very media consumption pattern over the last decade.

So now, fast forward to 2019 and we can see exactly where relying on social media as our exclusive source news has gotten us. We don’t necessarily see all the news that’s fit to print. We see what Facebook wants us to see based on its proprietary algorithm. We see the content that news outlets think I want to see based on its demographic targeting. Worst of all, we see fake news that people with questionable intentions want us to see – and I’m talking about actual fake news, not the kind of credible news that is termed “fake” by certain elected officials who have co-opted that term to describe news that is legitimate but unflattering. I see questionable items shared in my newsfeed every single day by people who ought to know better. These stories may even align with my particular politics and worldview, but it still enrages me to see them.

When we begin to talk about what is Facebook’s moral obligation to police this stuff, I’m sometimes tempted to be lenient toward them as an independent third party that is merely providing the platform. It’s not as if Mark Zuckerberg personally looks at every single piece of content that is shared through his site. I’m also a believer to some degree of the rewards of a free and open marketplace unencumbered by unnecessary regulatory burdens. I accepted the terms and conditions (whether I actually read them or not), and I’m a reasonably savvy person who knows better than to trust that something is true just because I saw it on the Internet. But I think we have to go a little deeper than that in this day and age.

Let’s think about the regulations that broadcast media outlets have historically been obligated to comply with as trustees of the public airwaves. While the regulations have evolved over the decades since radio news first came into our homes, even today broadcast news, while protected by First Amendment press freedom, has certain obligations that the print media does not.

Those who buy ink by the barrel, the print media, have historically not been subject to those same regulatory guidelines, and that’s a good thing, because the press is our bulwark against would-be tyrants and other bad actors who seek to destroy our system of government.

Surely though, the internet falls somewhere in between those two examples. Who “owns” the internet is a question to which there is no definitive answer, but it is absolutely correct that public resources were used in its development. As such, it stands to reason that those who profit off of it have an obligation to ensure that the platforms that are earning billions off of users don’t become the mechanism through which our free and open society is destroyed. Mark Zuckerberg got wealthy off of people just like me, so it is only fair to ask that Facebook do its part to ensure that I’m protected from those his business allows into my personal information. So my answer to that question of what are the various social media platforms’ moral obligations is firmly in favor of protecting the public trust – and if they cannot be bothered to do that, we should all seriously rethink our relationship with Facebook. The question for me becomes whether that moral obligation should become a legal obligation, and with every bit of fresh information about how an antagonistic country actually influenced our national elections through manipulation of Facebook’s data, I’m more and more tempted to say yes.