David Kirkpatrick: Is Facebook Increasingly the Platform for the Right-Wing?
In Conversation with Andrew Keen on
the Keen On Podcast
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On today’s episode, David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, discusses the moral dilemmas of the tech industry.
From the episode:
David Kirkpatrick: Facebook is the platform for every wing. Facebook is the platform for political speech in much of the world, including the very large part of the dialogue in the United States, but I think what you can say is that Facebook has bent over backwards to avoid offending the right and in particular President Trump, and has made certain policy decisions that particularly favor the kinds of speech that is much more likely to come out of the right and the Trump campaign.
To be to be specific, Facebook has a rule that Zuckerberg has defended tenaciously and has implemented himself and has defended publicly, repeatedly, and it shows no sign of backing off from that. Politicians in particular are allowed to lie in advertising that they pay Facebook to distribute. Now, that is a very pernicious policy. In the United States and in much of the world, it tends to be the autocrats, the right wing, the the the more incendiary the people who are willing to be incendiary in order to advance their political cause at any cost, who are more likely to lie in their ads. So by definition, in the end, that policy facilitates the right more than the left.
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David Kirkpatrick was for many years the senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune magazine. While at Fortune, he wrote cover stories about Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, and numerous other technology subjects. Beginning in 2001, he created Fortune‘s Brainstorm conference series. More recently, he organized the Techonomy conference on the centrality of technology innovation for all human activity. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and appears frequently on television, radio, and the Internet as an expert on technology.
