This past week, a video edited to make it appear as though Nancy Pelosi’s mental health is deteriorating began circulating its way around Facebook. In accordance with our guidelines, we have decided not to remove the video from our platform. We at Facebook recognize the nefarious influence fake news has had on our society, and that’s why we are committed to our longstanding policy of shamelessly dodging accountability.
This decision comes lightly, and we have many choices other than merely standing by and doing nothing. But it’s important to remember that Facebook is not in the news business – we’re in the social media business. And just because our platform has a feature called News Feed, which nearly half of the country relies on for news consumption, doesn’t change the fact that we like making lots of money. Money is good – some would argue more good than things like values and doing the right thing. Plus, if we regulate fake news, do we also have to regulate not fake news? These are the false dichotomies we tend to struggle with.
Nevertheless, we have taken several ineffective steps to pretend we’re being proactive about this Pelosi thing. One, we made a vague effort to reduce the dissemination of the video after it had already been viewed 2.5 million times. This may seem like a half-assed effort to mitigate the spread of blatant propaganda, but when you consider that we very easily could have deleted the video altogether, it’s pretty clear it was no-assed.
And hey, we also added that fact checker! By pretending that we trust our users to critically evaluate the news despite everything we’ve ever learned about them, we should be able to run out the clock on this until some other story takes over the news cycle. By the way, feel free to “x” out of that fact checker if you’d rather just watch the video undistracted. Nancy likey the alcy!
Here at Facebook, we strive to create a platform that people will rely on to connect with family, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, data pirates, Russian bots, regular bots, and high school classmates. It is our utmost responsibility to make that experience as emotionally manipulative as possible. Exploiting the human condition is one of our core values, and it is this value that drives our ultimate mission: to prioritize ad revenue over doing anything at all to mitigate the hellworld of disinformation we’ve helped to create. To that end, we feel our hands-off-the-steering-wheel approach has been a tremendous success.
We hope this helps justify our thinly veiled deception, and in the future, we promise to continue shrugging our shoulders, making that weird “iunno” sound, and quietly slinking out of the room when faced with difficult questions. We value our users (about $3.50/person), and we are committed to making our platform the worst possible place it can be.
