Facebook Doesn't Care if You Burn to Death or Why Don't We Have a Public Social Network?
During a scorching, relentless wildfire season, Facebook has been flagging and removing dozens of posts containing links and screenshots from Watch Duty, a widely relied-upon wildfire alert app, as well as from federal and state agencies, according to interviews and Facebook conversations with nearly 20 residents, Facebook users and moderators, as well as employees from disaster response organizations. And it’s not happening just to people in Hutchinson’s rural and extremely fire-prone community 135 miles north of San Francisco but to volunteer responders, fire and sheriff departments, news stations and disaster nonprofit workers across California and in other states, according to screenshots.
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“It’s not just frustrating, it’s life-threatening,” said Angela Oakley, a manager with the American Red Cross, who had multiple posts marked as spam during Hurricane Debby. “I’ve noticed this happening with more and more frequency, especially around disasters. It’s unfortunate, as many people rely on social media and networking connections to stay safe during emergencies.”
This is almost certainly happening because Facebook is largely using algorithms instead of people to remove post that violate their rules. And algorithms are stupid. In a confirmed problem space, with well-defined parameters and inputs, they can be much faster than humans. But social media is not a space with well-defined input parameters and success conditions. You need a human to make sure you are not being, well, stupid enough to take down potentially lifesaving warnings during an actual emergency. But, well, shareholder price and profit are the most important things to American corporations so sucks to be you if you aren’t fireproof, apparently. Gotta make those billions!
Besides: favoring shareholders over all other concerns is guaranteed to bring about societal good. Martin Friedman told me so! I am sure after a few thousand people are turned to ash, the shareholders will let Facebook do the right thing.
These kinds of stories make me long for a publicly run social network. Now, I can already hear people screaming about the government favoring one viewpoint over another, first amendment this, censorship that. These people have apparently never heard of PBS or NPR. For all their flaws, they certainly don’t censor one political persuasion or another. And there are ways to moderate for tone rather than content that still have the effect of preventing harassment and social media firestorms.
But you don’t even have to have a fully functioning social media. Just a Bluesky or Facebook like setup for government agencies. Yes, government agencies post on Facebook, for example, because that is where the people are. But we could force these companies to open an API that marks emergency posts as emergency posts and exempts then from moderation. None of this would be hard or expensive, especially if we just have a list of government agency accounts and not an actual public social network. It is as close to a no-brainer as one can get.
And that is the problem — no one sees providing public communications as a no-brainer. We are so far gone in the worship of the market that we seem to forget that there are other options. Government can do things. It sent people to the moon, it created economic policy that won World War 2. And running a simple social media site is orders of magnitude easier than either of those tasks. Even running a real public social media site with moderation has templates — both in existing public media and in places like the Front Porch Forum.
And yes, you are going to say, “what about the Obamacare website!?!?” For those of you who do not remember, the original Obamacare marketplace website was a complete cluster at launch. But that sort of proves the point. That work was outsourced to multiple companies. Once the government stepped in to run the fix as its own concern, the marketplace was corrected incredibly quickly.
Our collective imaginations have been suffocated under a blanket of market hype and bullshit. The market is not punishing Facebook for removing emergency posts and endangering people. We don’t have to accept this nonsense, of course. We can build one for ourselves, collectively, through the means of our democratic control over our own society: the government. We just need to think bigger than the cramped, confined box of market uber ales. Milton Friedman is dead. It is long past time we buried his worst ideas with him.