Chris Hughes Helped Get Obama Elected, But Now That Facebook Helped Elect Trump, He Wants To Break It Up?

from the funny-that dept

Last week we wrote about Facebook co-founder Chris Huges' long, but remarkably uncompelling argument for why Facebook should be broken up. The post itself was quite long, but could be summed up in that Hughes listed out a variety of problems he attributed to Facebook, and then suggested breaking the company up and regulating speech on the internet in response. However, some of the problems he attributed to Facebook are not, in fact, because of Facebook, and he made no effort to show how his proposed solutions would actually solve any of those problems (indeed, there are arguments it might make some of them worse).

Dare Obasanjo tweeted a quite insightful tweet in response to Hughes' piece, noting that a lot of Hughes' (and others') concerns about Facebook can be traced back to the fact that Donald Trump won the election, and a lot of people believe that Facebook helped create that result:

It's quite wild to me that we're likely to see Facebook punished for the "crime" of getting Trump elected while he Teflon Don's his way through every scandal.

And then, he noted, that it's useful to put Hughes' comments into context, in that a decade ago, Hughes was being celebrated for using Facebook and social media to help elect President Obama. Hughes, famously, left Facebook to go work on the Obama campaign, and built up MyBO, the online platform to organize supporters of Obama's campaign.

His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another — not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook. MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.

It's not quite the same thing, obviously. However, it does seem notable that Hughes used social media effectively to help elect one President, and now seems to be quite disturbed and upset by the fact that it helped elect a different President. You can, perhaps reasonably, argue that the tactics, the scale, and the overall context are quite different today (organizing excited Millennials is pretty different than Russian trolls sowing discord), but it certainly does seem like valuable context in thinking about this.

Social media is -- like many technologies -- a tool. It can be used for things people like, and for things they dislike. We should be wary of assuming all the good comes solely from the technology at the same time we should be wary of assuming all the bad does as well.

Filed Under: barack obama, chris hughes, disinformation, donald trump, elections, get out the vote, politics
Companies: facebook

Be Careful What You Wish For: Twitter Temporarily Bans 'Get Out The Vote' Ads To Comply With 'Fake News' Law

from the why-does-no-one-ever-think-these-things-through dept

If there's one consistent theme that we've talked about on Techdirt over the past few decades, it's that attempts to regulate the internet based on a specifically observed "harm" almost always leads to bad outcomes. That's because trying to regulate away a harm frequently fails to take into account context and the specifics of how such laws would be interpreted. For example, over the last few years, there's been plenty of concern about fake news and questionable "political advertising" that is really just, let's say, "propaganda" from parties wishing to mess up the democratic process, rather than actually encourage effective democracy. Because of this we've seen attempts to pass "fake news" laws and "online political ads" laws that clearly come from a place of good intentions (mostly), but the actual impact can be far reaching and lead to unintended consequences.

For example, just last week people suddenly realized that, with the EU Parliamentary elections coming up next month, and France's new anti-fake news political advertisements law, that Twitter would be blocking the French government's own "get out the vote" advertising campaign:

Since December, France requires online political campaigns to declare who paid for them, and how much was spent.

But now Twitter has rejected a government voter registration campaign.

The company could not find a solution to obey the letter of the new law, officials said – and opted to avoid the potential problem altogether.

Of course, rather than realize that maybe the law they wrote was too broad, French government officials immediately... blamed Twitter. Oh, and they did so on Twitter.

That's France's Minister of the Interior saying "Twitter's priority should be to fight content that glorifies terrorism. Not campaigns to register on the electoral lists of a democratic republic." But, of course, that ignores that it was France's own extreme position on the law that lead Twitter to conclude the best way to comply was to block all political advertising, rather than go through the arduous process of keeping track of which political ads are allowed, which are banned, and to provide an open database of information about all of those ads.

Other French officials also complained... also on Twitter. Minister of Culture Franck Reister -- most recently seen eagerly cheering on censorship filters -- also chose to attack Twitter for trying to comply with France's bad law:

That one roughly says:

We must put an end to the irresponsibility of the platforms: @ Twitter pretends not to understand a law allowing simply a better information of the citizens during an electoral period ... whereas @ facebook has decided to apply it, in anticipation, in all the countries !

Note the focus: blaming Twitter for deciding it was too burdensome to host political ads, rather than recognizing it was the French law that made it so. Also, pointing to Facebook as a "good example" of agreeing to go through the arduous process kind of misses the whole point: the bigger companies (Facebook is a hell of a lot bigger than Twitter) can more easily comply with these laws, while smaller platforms find it too expensive. But, no matter. France's Minister of Culture assumes that all companies should have to spend tons of money just so his government can advertise on them.

Then there's Cedric O, the country's digital minister, who apparently thinks that Twitter should be forced to host some kinds of political advertising, because "the vote is sacred."

Right. The vote is sacred. But it was your government that passed a law that made it quite expensive to host any such advertising. Stop blaming the platforms for reacting appropriately to your bad laws.

Either way, after getting so much pressure in France, the company did back down, saying it was "clarifying" its political advertising rules in France to allow "Get Out The Vote" ads. So perhaps this is a happy ending situation, but what's most annoying is how French officials seem to think their own bad lawmaking is never the problem -- and that internet platforms making rational decisions based on the costs of complying with overreaching laws somehow reflects poorly on the platforms, rather than on their legislative abilities.

Filed Under: france, get out the vote, political advertising, regulations
Companies: twitter