Connection Failure - Washington Free Beacon

What's actually the problem with the world's biggest social media platform? Is it misinformation? Lack of regulation? That it rots the brains of children? Or that it makes us shrill, annoying caricatures of ourselves?

An Ugly Truth, by New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, pins all these problems and more on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The authors don't hold back: Before even opening the book, one encounters remarkably unflattering images of Zuckerberg's and Sandberg's faces on the cover. As the authors explore the rise of Facebook, they maintain this tenor: The two executives are the twin poles of power at Facebook, and together are responsible for a vast set of the world's problems.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg certainly come off as unsavory characters—the CEO calls early Facebook users "dumb fucks" for blithely giving away their personal information. Sandberg screams at employees in public. Despite her heralded "lean-in" feminism, the COO picks favorites among women at the company.
If there is a single through-line in An Ugly Truth, it's this: Believing false things is one of the worst things that can happen to an individual, and Facebook inaugurated a new era of widespread misinformation. The First Amendment right to free speech isn't absolute, and no one has a right to "algorithmic amplification." In a better world, platforms would work hand in hand with "disinformation experts," left-wing civil rights groups, and "trusted organizations" like the CDC to ceaselessly protect users from believing false things. They would prioritize news from "respectable" sources and downplay questionable conservative partisans. The problem with this framing, of course, is that we already live in the world Frenkel and Kang dream of. Facebook does coordinate with the federal government, it does censor theories the World Health Organization and CDC consider objectionable, and it does tag posts about COVID with an informational bar urging you to listen to the experts. It does "shadowban" content it thinks is misleading, and it purges the accounts of individuals who express political beliefs beyond the pale. Those actions haven't fixed the problem Frenkel and Kang identify, because they can't: There's never been a time when misinformation wasn't an endemic part of human life, or when the line between safe truths and dangerous lies was settled and accepted by all.