Battling the Big Lie by Dan Pfeiffer

Author:Dan Pfeiffer [PFEIFFER, DAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Facebook’s MAGAlgorithm6

During the summer of 2020, Facebook gave Democrats something to cheer about. Well, technically, Facebook’s Oversight Board did. This board acts as a self-appointed Supreme Court7 of sorts. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, Facebook finally did the thing it had resisted for years: it suspended Donald Trump’s account. Because Facebook is incapable of doing two good things in a row, though, it immediately offloaded the decision of whether to reinstate Trump at some point to its Oversight Board. I assume it did this to create distance between Zuckerberg and Sandberg and the decision, but it’s not clear why Facebook expected people to treat a board created and funded by Facebook, with members appointed by Facebook, who serve at Facebook’s discretion, as some sort of independent entity with credibility.

As the date for the Oversight Board’s decision approached, most Democrats assumed that Facebook would reinstate Trump. After all, the company had spent years bending over backwards to appease Trump and his base. Unlike Facebook, Twitter made its ban of Trump permanent. Twitter repeatedly pledged that nothing would cause the platform to reopen the case, including Trump’s launching a 2024 presidential candidacy. Zuckerberg has repeatedly resisted making a similar declaration.

As a natural pessimist with a never-ending low-boil rage at Facebook, I was sure the company would do the wrong thing. No one ever went broke betting on Zuckerberg to do something bad for the world. I even woke early on the morning of the board’s decision: I wanted to be prepared for an upcoming podcast and fire off a newsletter (and some tweets) lambasting Facebook. But the Oversight Board decided to continue Trump’s suspension for the time being. In a surprisingly enjoyable twist, the board also tossed the decision right back in Zuckerberg’s lap.

On Twitter, Democrats applauded the decision and expressed relief that Trump’s banishment would continue. I was a hundred words into a newsletter about how this was a big blow to Trump and Trumpism when I got a Twitter alert that demonstrated the absolute hollowness of the victory.

A few years ago, Kevin Roose of the New York Times set up a Twitter account that every day tweets out the Facebook posts garnering the most engagement. This account is one of the most depressing things I read daily, but it was never more depressing than on this day. According to Roose’s data, the top-performing links posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last twenty-four hours were from:

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