Profiles in courage: When blaming social media is a helluva lot easier than taking ownership
Political cowardice is the greatest threat to American democracy
Congress recently subpoenaed representatives from Facebook and Twitter. Twitter and Facebook screwed up — let’s get that out of the way. The recalcitrance of these massive and powerful social media platforms to identify, react to, and own up to Russian hacking of our elections is unpatriotic, takes for granted the awesome influence they have, and undermines the tenets of our democracy. Their entire ethos — an internet public square of ideas — is fundamentally democratic. Yet Mark Zuckerberg bailed on the hearing for a quarterly earnings call — literally prioritizing profits over the health of the democracy that make his company’s profits possible.
The only thing more ironic and cruel, however, is Congress spending taxpayer money on this song and dance of accountability. It would be one thing if congressional leaders as a whole demonstrated any sense of political courage leading up this moment or even admitted in these hearings to their culpability in creating this political environment. Instead, we’re left with a clown car full of directionless narcissists that want to hang the whole mess around the necks of Twitter and Facebook.
Again, Twitter and Facebook fucked this one up. And they’re going to have to pay for it.
But the very image of congressional hearings signal to the American people that these social media platforms bear a majority of the blame. The hearings launched a thousand thinkpieces about how “social media has become a direct threat to democracy” and cues headlines like “Is social media destroying democracy?” and big cover stories from high-minded publications like The Economist called “Do social media threaten democracy?” There’s a bit of irresponsible journalism here fueled by click-baiting and false equivalencies for sure (there is a whole other think piece to be written about news-making outfits’ culpability in eroding our political norms), but every official action of Congress is inherently news. The moment they called for hearings, as soon as subpoenas were sent, this was going to become a narrative.
When it comes to the actual mechanics of what Russian intelligence did with its bots, it’s not all that different from what I or any other communications political operative does for a living. We buy social media ads in the hopes of influencing voters because they don’t cost very much and reach a lot of people. Like political communications pros, Russian computer engineering bros have messages to communicate. We have a targeted group of individuals we have reason to believe that our messaging will be most effective on. Whether it’s pitching the low cost of a levy that provides housing for veterans to center-left suburban white women or a John Podesta-run pedophilia ring run out of a D.C. pizza shop to young, uneducated white men with guns — I — or social media genius Vladimir Zuckerburg — carve out our respective target demographic and pay Facebook a couple hundred rubles to show our content to them.
The underlying premise here is that the target demographic has to be receptive to the message. And Congress’s lack of competency of late is only matched by Congress’ lack of courage.
Scapegoating social media magnates loses sight of a fundamental truth: Russians hacked our political process. They did not hack Twitter or Facebook. They didn’t hack voting machines, individual social media accounts, or Secretary of State voter rolls. Russians hacked the very political environment within which we run campaigns and communicate messages. And the responsibility for that lies squarely on the shoulders of our republic’s leaders. Because of an opening created by weak-willed politicians who lack the moral conviction of an avocado pit, a Russian intelligence team armed with a plan drawn up by Wile E. Coyote and paid for by a kids’ snow-shoveling business helped swing a presidential election.
The existential threat our democracy faces today is real; and it’s the unintended outcome of the actions of bunch of self-entitled obstructionists who were sore about losing the presidency to a black kid with a funny name and wanted really, really badly to win midterm elections. They gave up long-standing principles for short term political gains. And it worked — they got the presidency, both houses of congress, and the goddamn Supreme Court. What these addle-minded Mensa rejects failed to consider in all their prowess, however, is that politics is just one of the ways in which you conduct the business of the people. And when you conflate the whole gargantuan job of governing with politics, you abdicate your duty to the people you work for, erode the strength of our political system, and open us up to Russian attack that was conceived by a couple KGB interns who just discovered Silicon Valley for the first time.
This threat is the unintended outcome of the actions of bunch of self-entitled obstructionists who were sore about losing the presidency to a black kid with a funny name and wanted really, really badly to win mid-term elections. They gave up long-standing principles for short term political gains. And it worked — they got the presidency, both houses of congress, and the goddamn Supreme Court. What these addle-minded Mensa rejects failed to consider in all their prowess, however, is that politics is just one of the ways in which you conduct the business of the people. And when you conflate the whole gargantuan job of governing with politics, you abdicate your duty to the people you work for, erode the strength of our political system, and open us up to Russian attack that was conceived by a couple KGB interns who just discovered Silicon Valley for the first time.
Congressional leaders — by and large, Republicans — weakened our political system and made us vulnerable. They aspired to their own moral failings and adhered to an unprincipled politics of cowardice. This approach has always been reckless, and the dog and pony show of congressional hearings today is a fucking travesty.
Now, more than ever before, is the time for political courage. Moral conviction and belief work because that’s the way politics was meant to be. You stand by an idea or a worldview and tell people, “If you elect me, I’ll go work with others to make your life better from this perspective I have.” They trust you, elect you to be in Congress. Maybe you change your mind. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe you voted a different way. Maybe there’s more nuance than fits neatly onto a yard sign. And maybe come re-election you try as hard as you can to explain yourself, but you lose. This is how American politics work.
Congress has obfuscated some of the biggest issues of our time, and in doing so, ceded its legislative power and robbed the public of serious conversations about priorities and national identity. We’ve been setting the bar lower and lower for so many years on both sides of the aisle — by refusing to vote on the Authorization to Use Military Force, by failing to actually do tax reform, and by skirting an honest-to-god conversation about the role and size of government in the face of an aging population and unimaginable technological advancements — we don’t even know at political courage looks like. We applaud the likes of Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake — who have only summoned the courage to tell the truth after they decline to run again.
Politics is a risky business. You take a position rooted in an ideology, a governing philosophy. Every one of these positions are supposed to put your job in peril. That’s how this works. That willingness to go to bat for it — and possibly strike out — is what makes the whole damn thing work. Politics is broken because we don’t do politics anymore. People mistrust our governing institutions because the people who were elected to comprise them distanced themselves from the citizenry; over the course of this game of politics, they learned to not trust each other or the people they serve.
