As Facebook loses relevance, it reminds us capitalism works

by Kevin Killough

On Oct. 4, Facebook had a global outage. For several hours, users around the world were unable to argue politics with complete strangers, let friends know their relationship status had changed or show pictures of their dinner. 

Many people, understandably, rejoiced in this moment of social media downtime. Yet, for the better part of the past year, many of those same people, even conservatives who claim to champion small government, were arguing that Facebook had become a prolific and indispensable monopoly that needed to be regulated as a public utility. 

Facebook went down and the world functioned just fine — perhaps even better — without it.

It’s unfortunate many conservatives haven’t maintained a commitment to small government principles in the face of the Facebook problem, but it’s worth noting, they are bearing the brunt of the company’s excesses.  

The platform limited the sharing of articles about a damaging Hunter Biden story that could have hurt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It ignored months of violent riots by left-wing activists only to later treat Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as armed insurrectionists. And it suspended former president Donald Trump. 

Rather than facilitating an open platform with which users could freely exchange information — accurate, inaccurate, or just plain dumb — the company decided its job was to be the arbitrator of its version of the truth. It hired or partnered with an army of fact checkers whose naked partisanism was at times astounding. 

Not surprisingly, this has not left people better informed. Facebook enacted a policy that prevented people from sharing information about a possible link between a lab in Wuhan, China, with a history of safety concerns, and the pandemic that wreaked havoc on the globe for the past two years — a hypothesis we now know has merits. It finally lifted the restriction, but for months, people wrongly believed the lab-origin hypothesis was just a kooky conspiracy theory. 

Journalist John Stossel is suing the company for defamation over its fact check practices. Stossel produced videos arguing that, while climate change is real and a problem, California’s mismanagement of its forests was partly to blame for wildfires. Facebook deemed the information false because, its fact checkers argued, global warming is real. This was never disputed in any of Stossel’s videos on the topic. Stossel tried to appeal the decision, and Facebook wouldn’t budge. The incorrect false-warning label, Stossel claims in his suit, hurt him financially.

These are just a few examples of the company’s notoriously partisan suppression of information under the guise of protecting people from misinformation. 

When the site went down on Oct. 4, it’s no surprise people danced with joy. It also demonstrated we don’t need Facebook. We never did. 

As unassailable as many conservatives made Facebook out to be, it’s always been quite vulnerable. Facebook exists in an industry where competitors can quite literally spring up overnight with a very small investment. 

Increasing pressure from sites like Snapchat and TikTok have deprived Facebook of younger audiences to the point younger generations have started referring to it as “Boomerbook.”

Advertisers prize those younger demographics, because young people tend to try new products and are easily enticed by new trends. Not only is Facebook likely losing its hold on that valuable audience, it’s alienated a big chunk of the older audience by treating us like a bunch of uneducated hillbillies incapable of discerning fact from fiction.

As hard as it is to picture a day when Facebook loses its relevance in the social media world, this phenomenon is not without precedence. A few of us might remember a site called MySpace, one of the early pioneers of social media. Today, few people even know what it is, because a competitor, Facebook, came along and crushed it. 

As Facebook endures threats from competition, it has a new crusader calling for the federal government to regulate it — Facebook. 

In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg advocated before the federal Consumer Protection & Commerce and Communications & Technology subcommittees for reform of Section 230. 

The legal provision protects internet companies from being held liable for things people say on their platforms. This month, Facebook launched a full-blown campaign to get the feds to reform Section 230, including advertisements in the New York Times asking the federal government to repeal the provision. 

This was one of the reforms that conservatives, including Donald Trump, wanted to see happen. Why would Facebook suddenly advocate a reform that Trump himself called for? Most likely, because it will kill competition. Those pesky startups that can spring up anytime would find it extremely difficult to operate without Section 230 protections. 

Facebook has a team of software engineers who can put together algorithms to purge anything that could harm it, not to mention that army of fact checkers who would have, under a repeal of Section 230, very legitimate reasons to remove from the platform any information that could potentially be libelous. Its competitors wouldn’t have those kinds of resources and would have their operations severely limited.  

This whole saga should serve as an important lesson. First, no matter how large a company, if it treats people terribly, it will create opportunities for competitors and sew the seeds of its own destruction. Secondly, nothing will maintain a bad company’s market dominance like interference from government. 

Champions of capitalism should trust the free market, even when its outcomes aren’t entirely satisfying. Giving in to the impulse to use regulation to force problematic companies to do what you want will more often than not produce more problems than it solves.

If capitalists don’t trust capitalism, who will? 

-Powell Tribune