Facebook standing up for democracy? Don’t make me laugh
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…
