FOCUS: Masha Gessen | Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Know What the First Amendment Is For

28 October 19

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FOCUS: Masha Gessen | Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Know What the First Amendment Is For

Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
Gessen writes: "What is the First Amendment for? I ask my students this every year."

EXCERPT:

The news media have traditionally borne the responsibility for insuring that the actual purpose of the First Amendment is fulfilled. Yet Americans are content to leave this essential component of democracy to profit-driven corporations with next to no regulatory oversight. We accept it as the natural order of things that the flow and volume of news is largely determined by the needs of advertisers, and that, when advertising dollars dry up, so does the news. We are so afraid of censorship—or, perhaps more accurately, we have such lazy ways of thinking about accountability—that we would rather let newspapers die and media corporations form monopolies than consider government regulation and public funding. In the past three decades, most of the public conversation about news media—as facilitated by the news media—has devolved to the level of my students’ initial, knee-jerk response to the First Amendment question. Much like Zuckerberg in his free-speech speech, or in his stubborn refusal to remove misleading political ads, we talk about rights without talking about responsibilities. This is what has allowed Facebook to evade responsibility, and to avoid even being identified as a media company.

With Facebook and other new media, technology has accelerated and amplified existing processes and problems. Facebook is not an anomaly in the American media system—it is precisely the result of rampant profit-seeking, lazy thinking, and a lack of civic responsibility. Of course Zuckerberg tells Buttigieg whom to hire. Of course he sees Warren, and not Trump, as an existential threat. Of course Facebook allows Trump to run false ads. The company doesn’t know what the First Amendment is for—and we are not making it learn.

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