Analysis. “I don’t think Facebook, or any other platform, should be the arbiter of the truth. ” This sentence, which Mark Zuckerberg spoke in March 2019, is far from new in the speech of the almighty boss of Facebook. And it was returned to him in the figure, in recent days, after major social networks limited the dissemination of an article from the New York Post on Joe Biden’s son, based on questionable information suspected of being part of an electoral destabilization operation.
“Arbiter of truth”: the term, in English (arbiters of truth), almost sounds like an insult. In May, after accompanying false messages published by Donald Trump with warnings, Twitter found itself the target of violent criticism from the Republican camp.
Company CEO Jack Dorsey then had immediately explained that these warnings ” they do not do [de Twitter] an arbiter of truth. Our intention is to show where statements are contradictory and to give all the information so that people can form an opinion for themselves ”.
The consensus of reality has crumbled
In a politically ultra-polarized country, where former Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway could call an official lie a “Alternative facts”Claiming to want to distinguish the true from the false is an eminently political act. Republicans and Democrats don’t just disagree on opinions anymore: they disagree on facts.
The consensus of reality has crumbled. And with him, the unchanging position of the big social networks, which repeat over and over since their creation that they are in no way media, but simple technical intermediaries. This posture, moreover perfectly defensible, appears more and more fragile in the current political debate in the United States. This October 28, the CEOs of the main social networks will also have to defend themselves before a special Senate committee.
Not because the founding principles of these companies – including absolute respect for the First Amendment on freedom of expression – have changed. But because the political world in which they operate has changed. In the 2000s, when Twitter and Facebook were born, no one imagined that a sitting president could knowingly spread false information about the reliability of the electoral system or a pandemic. American social networks are swimming in cognitive dissonance: their systems were not designed for a world in which the main source of disinformation on Covid-19 is the President of the United States.
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