The New Yorker’s Steve Coll said that the media and journalists “have to come to terms” with free speech being “weaponized against the principles of journalism.”
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism, and what do we do about that?” Coll said Monday during Morning Joe on MSNBC.
The New Yorker’s @SteveCollNY:
“[Mark Zuckerberg] profoundly believes in free speech.
Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism.” pic.twitter.com/NXvMv7pIqB
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 7, 2020
Coll’s remarks came after host Kasie Hunt asked what “mass platforms” such as Facebook should do to solve the issue of misinformation spreading on the internet.
Coll responded by saying that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “profoundly believes in free speech,” which he suggested was a problem for journalism.
“The homogeneity of the media in the ‘60s and ‘70s obviously wasn’t all a good thing. And it was ripe for disruption, and it has been disrupted. And Facebook is one of the big disrupters,” Coll said. “I mean, you know, this is a private corporation that is motivated, as all companies are, to make money that is acting as a kind of public square. And to expect that it is going to adjust its motivations to preserve democracy or to do the right thing all of the time, it’s just naive. That’s not what it’s built to do.”
Coll said Facebook is guilty of “breaking things” and then not fully fixing the problems it creates.
“And the history of Facebook that’s described in this narrative is one of continually breaking things and then trying to fix them partially and getting better and better at apologizing,” Coll said. “But I came away from it thinking, you know, it’s a structure. It is not something that can be changed except by changing the structure of it. And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016, they’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg.”
Facebook has come under increasing pressure from both sides of the political aisle for competing reasons. Democrats have criticized the company for not doing more to combat the spread of misinformation on the platform, while Republicans have accused the company of censoring conservative points of view.
That debate is set to spill into the courts after it was reported last week that more than 40 states plan to sign a New York-led antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission is also readying a similar lawsuit against the company, focusing on Facebook’s content moderation policies.
