Week in Review - For Facebook, a Biden win could mean some stability

Saturday, October 17, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hello hello, and welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about Apple’s audio opportunity, this week I’m talking about a period of peace for social networks.

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The Big Story

You can only put so much faith in polling, a lesson ingrained in our memories by the 2016 Presidential election, and yet, with just a few weeks to go it appears that the polls are showcasing a shrinking number of paths towards an electoral victory for President Trump, something that’s reportedly starting to affect the morale of his campaign leadership.

The question I’ve been thinking about is if Biden wins, just how much easier will life get for Facebook?

Much of the current scrutiny being paid to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube owes no small part to the 2016 presidential election and some of the weaponization of disinformation that occurred during and after it. Some of that scrutiny in the case of Russian election interference or the Cambridge Analytica scandal was perhaps a tad overblown at the time, but there have been meaningful critiques given to how these platforms have let disinformation flourish across their sites. If anything, we’ve learned that these companies weren’t prepared to mesh their deepest libertarian ideals of an open internet with the actual face of a rapidly scaling connected web.

If Biden wins, will these problems disappear? Probably not, but I do think they will be less visceral. In the Trump era, the fringe has moved mainstream, conspiracy theories have gotten oval office endorsements and the truth is only as good as it is useful. Those have been tough waters for social media companies to navigate, especially Facebook which wasn’t taking a lot of these issues quite as seriously as they should have. They’ve made major strides but still encounter tough choices on a daily basis.

Just this week, we saw the diverging reactions of Facebook and Twitter in response to a New York Post story that emerged with plenty of questions surrounding the authenticity of the documents at hand, something that was a conundrum for the platforms to address. Facebook took an active step slowing the reach of the story, while Twitter went nuclear and blocked shares of the link in question. Twitter attracted a lot of criticism, and for good reason, the company has a poor track record when it comes to evenly applying its own policies.

Conservatives have framed their own battle with Facebook and Twitter, arguing that the platforms go out of their way to minimize conservative voices. Meanwhile liberal-leaning pundits have argued that Facebook has served as too friendly a hub to groups discussing dangerous ideologies and Twitter has done too little of anything, letting abuse run rampant on their platform with few safeguards in place for anyone.

Facebook under a Biden administration will, if anything, have less crises to deal with stateside. The mainstream conspiratorial fringe will turn to a more fringe fringe, and the broader media will likely be less busy calling out the actions of bad actors on these platforms. Biden is inarguably a more conventional politician, and convention means stability. This will probably lead to Facebook being able to take things at a less breakneck pace on U.S. soil, something that may allow them to let PR drive less of their product than has been the case in the past few years.

But with less than 3 weeks until the election, nothing is guaranteed.

Image Credits: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images

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