An interesting, in-depth article by Katie Harbath and Matt Perault who worked for Facebook’s public policy division between 2011 and 2021 entitled “Jawboned” describes how the US government tried to make them change their content moderation policies with no legal basis.
Jawboning is the use of moral arguments in the context of politics and economics, usually when there is no clear way to act directly due to the lack of regulation that covers the new scenarios created, in this case, by the appearance of powerful new technologies.
The term comes from the donkey jaw Samson managed to slay a thousand Philistines, as illustrated in the accompanying painting by Guido Reni from 1616. In the article, the authors describe several meetings with government representatives and their “incessant,” attempts to influence them, which they rejected as undemocratic. They refer in particular to the period after 2016, when “the technology industry was seen as the destroyer of democracy”, a context that made the practice of jawboning, both implicit and explicit, much more intense and persuasive.
The article provides invaluable insight into how companies’ public policy and government relations departments work. I have some experience here, due to my role as an analyst and technology chronicler, so few surprises, but still, it is enlightening, especially in the US context.
I have to say that I don’t support the authors’ arguments, and don’t necessarily think that a government’s attempts to appeal to moral reasons to try to influence the practices of a company is undemocratic, always assuming that we are talking about a democratically elected government that acts in the interest of public.
In fact, I would hope that my government would seek to regulate the behavior of a company whose motto at that time was “move fast and break things”, and that was breaking all kinds of things. There is plenty of evidence that the activities of Facebook are a threat to democracy, and in suggesting that the US government was behaving in an authoritarian manner, the authors are merely trying to excuse what they did during their time at Facebook.
What Facebook has done, and what it continues to do cannot be justified in any way. This is the company that took money from organizations seeking to interfere in elections in countless countries, that allowed itself to be used to orchestrate mass killing in Myanmar, and facilitated Cambridge Analytica to spy on its users. As we speak, it is paying celebrities millions of dollars so as to develop bots with their voices and images through generative AI without stopping to think about the consequences for fans who feel that they are really interacting with their idols, or if these synthetic characters will be used to get people to buy stuff or vote in a certain way. And when this latest project goes horribly wrong, there will be apologies all round, as has happened countless times before.
There is little wonder that the US government’s appeals fell on deaf ears: Facebook is devoid of any code of ethics and any hint of moral principle, whose founder should have been tried for crimes against humanity and sent to prison for a long time. And the authors of the article are among those who, “following orders”, helped him do what he did.
This is the issue here, not whether a government tries, generally unsuccessfully, to influence a morally bankrupt company with ethical arguments. Jawboning? If only more governments were prepared to take on the Facebooks of this world and hold them accountable.
Or am I missing something?
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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