What to make of Erick Erickson’s remarks on Facebook’s conundrum regarding former President Trump? I found them a slight puzzle:
Facebook has decided for now to keep Donald Trump off of their website. This story was misreported by the media that it was a permanent ban. It’s not a permanent ban as you will see.
But then he quoted WaPo:
Facebook tried to pass the buck on former president Donald Trump, but the buck got passed right back.
For several years, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has pushed the idea that he and his company shouldn’t be in the position of creating the rules of the road to govern the personal expression of billions of people. He went so far as to dedicate $130 million to fund an independent panel of outside experts to which the company could outsource the thorniest decisions about what types of content — and voices — should be allowed to stay up on Facebook.
When the company banned Trump on Jan. 6 for social media posts encouraging the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, Zuckerberg turned that hard decision over to that newly formed independent panel, the Oversight Board, for review, hoping it would make the final determination.
But on Wednesday, the 20-member panel punted the decision back to Facebook, recommending the company decide within six months whether to permanently ban or restore Trump’s account. He is currently suspended “indefinitely,” a one-off penalty outside Facebook’s usual rules.
Clearly, WaPo says nothing about this being a permanent suspension; indeed, that’s the point.
But Erickson is part of the propaganda leadership of the conservative movement, and since part of the task of that ministry is to discredit the opposition – the mainstream media – he has tacked on the customary discrediting statement and then plunged on with his own thoughts on the matter.
And trusts that readers don’t actually pay attention.
As for the rest of his post – he advocates for special privileges for former Presidents and that sort of rot – as a former social media provider myself[1], I say that this is clearcut. FB is corporate, not governmental, so they get to set the rules of the road and enforce them as they will.
And if their users don’t like their rules or their enforcement, they can state the same by taking their trade elsewhere. That’s the free market for you.
I suppose Erickson can special plead all he wants, but quite honestly that’s a quagmire just waiting for FB CEO Zuckerberg to fall into it. I recognize that Zuckerberg is trying to dance the line between alienating one group and alienating another group, but right now he’s in danger of alienating both. He should simply state that Trump crossed the line and is out, and if that pisses off his supporters, well, it’s a group that’s small and getting smaller, and he’ll just have to live with it.
This ceaseless agony isn’t good for FB’s rep, though. I’ve noticed the FB feed is getting sparse, and I have to wonder if this is a contributing factor.
1 Yep, ran a BBS back in the early 1980s to April of 2002. I never tried to make a dime directly off it, though. It was a lovely learning time, at least the first three quarters of it. Then the Web came and swallowed us.
