The task of announcing that Facebook is open again for Donald Trump's nefarious business was entrusted to Nick Clegg, once the hope of British liberals, today in the unfortunate role of global lobbyist for this company with major PR problems. This decision is wrong, but it hardly marks the end of democracy, as alarmists think that Facebook is the embodiment of fascism. Although the latest move of the largest social network in the world really confirms its incredible hypocrisy. She seems unable or unwilling to face her own contribution to various political disasters.
Hillary Clinton will never be forgiven for her 2016 "bunch of wretched people" statement, even though Trump and his ilk have said and done truly wretched things. Her passing remark that some Americans are "incorrigible" is truly scandalous. Democracy is based on the idea that no one is irredeemable, that you should never give up on anyone, no matter how hard it is. Those who participated in anti-democratic actions must be given the opportunity to convince others that they have changed.
In America, multiple felons are permanently disenfranchised. It is unacceptable to exclude people from the democratic process forever. Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, after years of evading criminal responsibility, was eventually sentenced to community service. He later managed to return to politics, even making a bizarre debut on TikTok, where he tried to appear youthful in order to be supported by the Italian ragazzi even though, due to multiple facelift operations, he resembled a wax figure.
Trump has never been held accountable for his wrongdoings, nor has he shown remorse for his role in what Facebook cautiously calls "civil unrest" in an official statement (as if it were an event for which both sides were responsible). By letting him come back, Facebook is signaling that neither the past nor what the perpetrator thinks about it matters. It's as if without Trump on Facebook, citizens can't find out what the "king of social media" (as Nigel Farage called him) is thinking, as if that deprives them of vital information, which is obviously a nonsensical claim since Trump still leads the most public life in history America. Journalist A. Dž. Liebling noted a long time ago that full freedom of information is guaranteed only to media owners. Today, the owners of social networks have that privilege.
If Facebook invokes the narrowest possible justification for banning public speech, it can be said that Trump did not directly call for violence. But even that is debatable. In a recent post on his Truth Social platform, he called out two African American election observers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shay Moss, who he was already making life miserable for in 2020. "What is the Great State of Georgia going to do with the CHAOS created by Ruby Freeman?" , asked the former president.
Facebook has introduced new "protection measures" against posts that incite hatred and violence. But the corporation must be aware of the digression, which is widely used by far-right politicians, where every sanction of the moderator is proclaimed as confirmation that the right is always a victim on social networks. If Trump survives on this platform he wins, and if they remove him again he will be the winner again.
Facebook itself behaves the same way. Despite all the contrite talk of "open debate" and "community welfare" its business model is based on optimizing user anger. Anger implies maximum participation and therefore profit. That's why all attempts to reduce the toxicity of the outages on that network fail. Its supervisory board, an impressive collection of former politicians, judges and experts, can criticize Facebook's individual decisions but has no substantive control over company policy. This committee immediately distanced itself from Trump's return, stressing that it was not involved in the decision about it. He also requested greater transparency of the network's work. And transparency is exactly what platforms have always denied the public, governments and researchers.
In a sense, Facebook knows that its business model is irreparable, because it was created to produce scandals. The fact that we now call its parent company Meta distances Facebook from accusations of fascismizing the public space and is a remarkable PR triumph. (Google never convinced us to call it Alphabet, although while it engaged in pervasive surveillance and stole our personal data, it was never seen as the epitome of evil like Facebook.)
The conversation about the role of social networks in undermining democracy is full of inadmissible generalizations. Every media revolution caused a moral panic – the printing press supposedly led to religious wars, radio enabled Hitler and television enabled McCarthyism. But such technological determinism is superficial: innovations have also deepened democracy. Social media and Facebook's business model are not the same thing. But the Trump decision still shows that Facebook remains a faithful ally of neoliberalism.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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