Mark Zuckerberg made the case for Facebook allowing political ads containing falsehoods on Thursday in a lengthy speech at Georgetown University, according to The Boston Globe. This comes in the wake of widespread conversation around the ethics and legality of knowingly getting paid to spread lies.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren even paid for intentionally false ads on the site last week to prove how easy it is.
Zuckerberg referenced the likes of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the First Amendment and its protection of free speech, including lies. However unfortunate, he’s right. There’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents lies from being spread by anyone other than Congress.
But that’s not to say doing so is right or moral, especially because we know it works. Russia was investigated for this very thing, not because they spread lies on Facebook, but because the lies they spread clearly impacted the results of U.S. elections.
Zuckerberg owns Facebook (or at least a lot of it) and it is under his and other administrators’ discretion to decide if they will allow lies to be published. It’s completely legal at the moment, not to mention it takes a huge workload off of the site to file through their ad requests to fact check. This way, they can take the ad money and claim it’s a statement of free speech.
Facebook doesn’t claim to be a hard news source and therefore they have no obligation to ensure the content on their site is factual. The only potential consequences false ad promoters could face is a libel lawsuit, which is already a lengthy and expensive process. Trying to file through the thousands of ads and posts on the site every day to find all of the lies would be a logistical nightmare.
In these cases, it is up to the user to be informed and do the research themselves on whether what they see in their feed is true. Unfortunately, the majority of the population aren’t going to exit Facebook and open Safari to fact check a political ad, not to mention the thousands of false posts made by individuals every day for free.
The notions of free speech and libel laws were created before the internet had even been thought of and are not adapted to address social media platforms with millions of users.
Facebook, over the years, has become much more than a way to connect with college friends. First, it broke out of the college student bubble. Now, its breaking away from being simply a way to connect with friends and becoming a platform for speech on critical issues.
Even so, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are completely justified in their stance on this issue. Lies will be covered under free speech until lawmakers recognize the issue at hand and apply more fierce libel laws to the evolving platforms people use to absorb information.
Even those that think they do stay well-informed are likely also using social media and the lines between legitimate and illegitimate news sources are easily blurred on these sites.
It is more important now than ever before to uphold the standards of truthful and thorough journalism. In the face of rampant lies, we must continue to objectively and factually cover what happens in the world so that we may never lose sight of the truth.
