Facebook is already an ‘arbiter of truth’ — it even *creates* truth
We get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we dwell on concepts like truth, love, and freedom. They seem so immutably transcendental — these concepts have no single physical correlate. Instead, we feel like we can point to them high above us as vague yet unchanging figures. Still, we strive to reach them — perfect forms for our capture (or our dismissal, if they are negative concepts). Plato, in his Theory of Forms, would argue that love has a perfect, unachievable form; all love in our world is a mere shadow.
This is a romantic notion that doesn’t reflect the pedestrian reality that these ‘transcendental’ concepts are human conceived, and exist because we believe in them. They only have any existence as lenses through which we perceive our material world. We conceptualise freedom through how we see it in movies; we understand love through our experience with our partner. Technology acts as a medium for concepts as well. As the philosopher of technology Don Idhe points out, a microscope reveals to us a new, microscopic realm of reality, but also changes our ability to perceive the realm of everyday reality. Reality is the microscopic, but it somehow also has to be the human.
Concepts, then, become activated through things in our life-world. These things become the lens through which we see the world and the world sees us. This much is relatively obvious.
What is less obvious is that these conceptual lenses are altered by the the act of us viewing the world and the world viewing us. Concepts mediate how we see the world, and the understanding that arises from this mediation will then actually change our understanding of the concept (you might call this the hermeneutic circle).
Such a conception is beyond Mark Zuckerberg, who recently made the following claim:
I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.
Mark Zuckerberg made these comments to Fox News recently, in response to Twitter issuing a fact-check on President Trump’s tweets. Truth to Zuckerberg is something that exists apart from the means by which it expressed. Many people may agree. It’s the desirous transcendental truth that is the allure; Zuckerberg, here is appealing to the notion that his creation has no impact on a concept such as “truth” by suggesting Facebook is in a position to choose to not arbitrate the truth. It is a neutral medium, in his reckoning.
But Facebook has created a spectrum of our life-world that simply did not exist before. It did not just extend our ability to communicate, it created a new way of knowing the truth and what truth actually means to us. If it does all this, it certainly ‘arbitrates’ truth.
You can understand this by simply making a series of uncontroversial statements about the way of the world.
To run with one example: people on Facebook can see the world as filtered through feeds, often which contain posts linking to blog articles with little to no editorial standards, as least relative to existing news media. The explosion of these sites is facilitated through social media simply because of the ease and scale at which their content can be transmitted. News before Facebook required enormous amounts of effort to scale to large amounts of people; Facebook (and other social media) helped to change this. And when posted, these articles are filtered a second time through any additional comments of people who are posting or commenting on the article.
The knowing of truth as conceptualised on Facebook becomes a unique process: rather than truth being filtered through a fact-checked news, truth is editorialised through individuals without journalistic integrity or training, as well as friends and colleagues. The material conditions that Facebook created allowed for all of this to happen, which was not the case before. How we see the truth of the world and the world sees the truth of has changed.
But the concept of that truth changes as well because truth has become something that is known through Facebook. Truth is a post by a friend; is a link a stranger shares on a Facebook page you follow; is the cacophony of noise filtered through Facebook. Truth is an assembled, concrete entity with concrete comments. It is materially different from an article written in ink by a professional or a verbal conversation between friends, and we have to see it thus. Of course, this is not the only truth known to people, but it is an enormous truth for many people.
What does this mean? It’s incredibly difficult to parse the effects, and studies that try tend to do so in lab settings, abstracted away from the conditions of life-world of how someone experiences the truth. But what’s clear is that for many this new way of knowing is the way truth comes about — and it becomes a definitive truth to them.
Another example: truth is something that is relative to communities. As an instance, evangelicals have different ways of knowing the truth, as do many religious groups. Facebook, through a combination of facilitation via algorithms (recommending Facebook groups and Pages) and community facilitation (commenting, galleries, events etc), has drastically increased the number and richness of communities. QAnon, zoomer memegroups, patriot groups — literally millions of groups, based on ideals and counter-ideals, has exploded. Each of these groups facilitates truth in their own way, through their own sources. What does truth look like to these groups and how do they come to it? Social structures and norms inhibit or disinhibit ways of knowing, biases and expectation in processes that are enormously difficult to parse. This is not unlike many evangelicals who see truth as in the literal word of the bible, and known only through the bible (and not as a biblical interpretation).
And again, this happens because Facebook made truth a material concept and this in turn changes our conception of truth. This is a sort of epistemological (how do we go about knowing the world?)- ontological (what things are there?) feedback loop.
Of course, this feedback loop is nothing new.
William Caxton, the person who built Britain’s first printing press, printed translations of classic books. He noticed one translation of a Socratic dictum he was copying from left out comments that were particularly terrible to women. Should he stay true to the original text or follow the translator’s line and omit it, which perhaps better suited the world? He seemed to struggle with his power, but he realised it for what it was. Truth to him, and to all involved in the new medium of print, became instantiated materially through the printing press. Caxton realised he was an arbiter of truth and that truth would become something known through books. He went on to publish anti-Islamic tales involving the Crusades, reflecting his desire that every “Christian man may be better encouraged to enterprise warre for the defense of Christendom”. Truth became to be seen through the printing press and the printing press’ truth became the truth.
Of course, this is not to say that Facebook should be the ones to arbitrate the truth, but they should engage with the fact that they do this already, and much more as well.
Zuckerberg is not a liar, I don’t think. But he isn’t thinking hard enough — or more accurately — in the right way. He seems to think in code, in logic, and in economics. He doesn’t understand how concepts work with people, with technology, and with the real world.
Perhaps it is because of the Silicon Valley mindset, which sees concepts as transcendental, which thinks in ideal forms rather than in how concepts intermingle with materiality and sociality? Perhaps if Zuckerberg studied more philosophy and less engineering, he would be able to see this?
Perhaps this is an unfair skewering of this field and of these people. Yet it’s clear his view is unbalanced.
Whatever it is, there’s a lot more truth to how truth is mediated by Facebook than in Zuckerberg’s mere conception of it.
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