In the cultural crossover event of the year, Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last couple days getting stretched out on a rack by each and every member of Congress looking to get a good sound bite out of the ridiculous ordeal that is his testimony about Facebook privacy invasions.
The whole thing just seems like an asinine political circus, with legislators puffing themselves up to act tough and push Zuckerberg around on user privacy issues as if the NSA wasn’t a thing—and it all comes down to the use of information from Facebook profiles that’s already public. Not even private and not something to make a big swaggering stink out of.
Besides questions about where the responsibility lies for safeguarding personal details (it’s hard to imagine how people don’t know by now how having a Facebook profile works) a particularly interesting bit focused on allegations of censorship, rather than privacy.
Good ol’ Ted Cruz stepped up to the plate to try to wring some answers out of the Facebook CEO about cases of the social media monolith banning and restricting conservative content and even whole pages—asking if Facebook is a neutral public platform, without bias. What he got was a lot of wandering rhetoric about safety and things that “we can all agree are clearly bad” but that’s beside the point.
Whether Facebook has such a bias and selectively censors content and if so why, are secondary questions to the root of that issue: does it have that right?
The short answer, as many have adamantly asserted, is yes. At the end of the day, Facebook is a private business and can run itself as it pleases unless by doing so it commits fraud or violates contracts and so on. As a private business, it has no obligation to honor all forms of speech and is free to discriminate as it pleases—often to the glee of those who love seeing opposing viewpoints getting hassled.
That’s been the common answer to cries of censorship and foul play coming from generally conservative sources, directed at social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. They’re private companies, get over it!
But a different tune is sung when other private companies try to mind their own business, their own way. (“Mind your business” was actually the motto printed on the first U.S. pennies, courtesy of Benjamin Franklin). Instead of private entities that have control over the way they do business and with whom, small businesses become slaves to the public that must serve all, without question, as soon as they open their doors. Their shop, their materials, their products—all up for grabs by anyone who walks in, regardless of personal beliefs and preferences about the ends the work of their hands is going toward.
Obviously, the prominent examples here are Christian shop owners declining to make cakes for gay weddings, and getting crucified for it. That isn’t an issue of religious freedom or gay rights, but of personal liberty—the right to say “I won’t do this,” not “You can’t do that.” To make choices in your own life, for yourself.
That’s what issues of censorship and discrimination come down to—whether it’s a massive social media institution used by the entire country or a shop with a little bell that gets tripped by the door when you walk in, private businesses are not obligated to give equal consideration to all parties. A given practice might be bad for business, it might be stupid, but no one has the right to dictate how others do their work, which is the product of their very lives—which everyone, all people, have a right to live as they please as long as they stay in their own bubble.
Facebook gets to do what it wants, and so does everyone else.
