As long as America has a corporatist government, saying Facebook is a private company that can censor what it wants is a nonsensical argument.
"This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."
~ President Rutherford B. Hayes, 1888
When I’m feeling like a particularly arrogant and self-righteous twerp, I like to snicker at the American debate between proponents of socialism and capitalism. Advocates of various branches and franchises of socialism point at the current system and say “Look! Look how broken it all is! This is what capitalism has brought us!” The advocates of various factions of capitalism point at the current system and say “Look! Look how broken it all is! This is what big government has brought us!” Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking “Umm, neither of you are criticizing capitalism or socialism. Your beef is with corporatism, and it’s all you’ve ever known.”
These ideological debates you see so much of within partisan politics are innately nonsensical. Big government vs. small government, libertarianism vs. socialism, capitalism vs. communism; America has never seen a trace of any of those things in living memory, so nobody has a clue what they’re talking about or what relevance those ideas would have to America today. All any living American has ever known is a nation in which powerful moneyed interests prop up and expand the powers of government in exchange for beneficial arrangements. That’s what corporatism is. The wealthy owners and operators of international corporations and banks give politicians the tremendous amount of money they need to continue and further their political careers, and in return they’re given tax breaks, tax loopholes, deregulations, competitor-killing legislation, the elimination of inconvenient environmental laws, and so on. Cluster Munitions ‘R’ Us donates money to Johnny Neoliberal’s campaign, and before you know it those patented cluster bombs are falling on a nation whose destruction just so happens to benefit Johnny’s other generous donors.
If you have any doubt that Americans are living under a corporatist plutocracy, check out these graphs from the 2014 Cambridge University study on the extent to which moneyed interests influence the outcome of U.S. legislation. This first graph indicates the probability of a piece of legislation being passed compared to the percentage of economic elites who support it:
As you might expect, the more economic elites favor a piece of legislation, the greater the probability of its passing. Moneyed interests have influence over what happens in the U.S. government. Now compare that to this graph which shows how much influence the wishes of the average American citizen has over the probability of a piece of legislation getting passed:
Zilch. Regardless of whether zero percent or a hundred percent of average Americans want a piece legislation passed, the probability of its passing remains the same. No matter who they vote for or who they phone bank for or whose dank memes they circulate, average Americans have effectively zero influence over how their government behaves on a legislative level.
So powerful corporations are a massive, inextricable part of America’s current system of government, easily more so than the elected politicians they essentially install into office. When we see the same five corporate giants who dominate the media in the United States colluding with powerful political parties in WikiLeaks documents, what we have is effectively state media, since large corporations are the most powerful branch of the U.S. government.
This is my meandering, roundabout way of getting to my titular point that Facebook censorship is corporatism at its most pernicious. I see Americans arguing that since Facebook is a private company, it can censor whatever it wants, ignoring the fact that they live in a country where large "private companies" do not exist separately from their government. Facebook is fast approaching two billion users worldwide, so you may be sure that Mark Zuckerberg is being approached constantly by powerful interests in both the so-called "private sectors" and "public sectors" like a bunch of greased-up Jersey Shore sleazebags at a nightclub asking "How you doin'?"
Well we pretty much know how Mark Zuckerberg is doin'. WikiLeaks reveals he set up a meeting with the Clinton campaign to figure out how he can best insert himself into the political system, and the new "fake news fact-checking" organization he's setting up to control what information gets circulated is full of establishment hacks and extremely powerful Clinton supporters, including the notorious Dracula of Thailand, George "I don't feel guilty because I'm engaged in an amoral activity" Soros. He's plainly in bed with the neoliberal Democratic establishment, and he's becoming a key player in helping to manipulate the public narrative in their favor.
And make no mistake, manipulating the public narrative is the single most important thing for the oligarchy, and always has been. Public consensus is the only thing that keeps existing power structures in power. If Americans all of a sudden collectively decided that some impoverished six year-old girl in Nebraska is their empress, that’s exactly what would happen because power only exists where the public consensus agrees it exists, and the U.S. would suddenly have a lot more Disney princess and Dora the Explorer-themed national emblems. Americans could all decide tomorrow that those old AOL sample CDs they used to hand out are the new form of currency, and some hoarder in Arizona would instantly become the richest man in the country. The only thing stopping Americans (and humans the world over) from casting off the existing power structures like a heavy coat on a warm day and creating a society more enjoyable for everyone is the consensus narrative, which throughout human history has always tended to favor a few very powerful individuals while disadvantaging everyone else.
The arrival of the internet threatens to change all that, and 2016 has highlighted this like never before. If ordinary people are able, for the first time in the history of human civilization, to create their own narratives about society, existing power structures can only fall away. People can say “Nah we’re not doing that anymore” to all the crazy, ecocidal things the oligarchs have been making us do all this time, and create something useful instead.
So many people live their whole lives without ever grokking into the way that everything that drives our species, from money to government to religion to philosophy to language to culture itself, is based on stuff people made up in their minds. Mostly dead people, too, that’s what’s so crazy! It’s so crazy how much influence the ideas of dead people have over the way we live. Why should dead people have a say in how anyone lives? They’re the very last people you should ask about life!
But I digress. My central point here is that as long as the consensus society we’re all tacitly choosing to live in is one where big corporations are inseparable and indistinct from government, it’s nonsensical to defend the actions of a massive, politically-entrenched corporate entity like Facebook as those of “a private company that can censor whatever it likes.” As long as we’re ruled by corporatism and that sort of thing is happening in the corporations that rule us, the only sane response to this sort of thing is unmitigated outrage, both at the corporate powers and the political powers they’ve melded with. It's the same kind of corporatist corruption seen when American foreign and fiscal policy is dictated by arms dealers and bankers.
Yes, Facebook can and will censor whomever it pleases, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be angry, both at the neoliberal establishment’s attempts to silence dissenting narratives and at the corporatist system which makes such a thing possible. We need to find a way to protect our voices and our narratives from manipulation and censorship, because they are the most important weapons on either side of this battle. The attempt by toxic forces to wrest them from us is ultimately the greatest threat we face as a species.
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