Facebook’s foibles keep stacking up. It’s well known that the platform enabled Russian trolls to peddle propaganda and sow division before the 2016 election, that lax regulation of partner relationships enabled the disgraced British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of users without their consent and use them for targeted political manipulation, and that a recent security loophole welcomed hackers into the personal lives of 50 million people. Additional scandals regarding Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp, along with the general pathologies of social media, are extracting ever heavier tolls.
For some, the final outrage is a recent exposé by the New York Times indicating a rotten corporate culture among Facebook’s upper echelon. Apparently, executives’ elaborate rituals of public contrition—mea culpa press conferences and falling on swords in front of Congressional hearings—mask a concerted effort to cover up problems, delay regulatory action, and quash dissent. Among the most disturbing revelations is that Facebook tried to discredit critics by alleging an anti-Facebook conspiracy funded by billionaire bogeyman George Soros—a frequent trope in anti-Semitic propaganda about liberal political causes.
In response, many Facebook users have moved to delete their accounts, and many more still are wondering whether they have a moral obligation to do so. A recent Times op-ed by NYU philosopher L. Matthew Liao offers some advice. He contends that Facebook users are implicated in the company’s wrongdoing, because their usage supports the platform’s strength. But whether users have a duty to boycott Facebook, Liao argues, depends on whether the company crosses “moral red lines”—acts of egregious wrongdoing. Liao believes that Facebook hasn’t (yet) trespassed into this terrain, and so deleting Facebook isn’t a moral requirement.
I’m glad to see a philosopher tackling this question, and in such a prominent outlet no less. Like Liao, I’m a longtime Facebook user, and my thoughts here spring from a post I first published on that platform. But I think the philosophical issues involved are more complicated than Liao’s argument implies.
To my mind, the central issue at play here is the notion of complicity. Liao’s view seems to presuppose that if our participation in a social practice makes us complicit in culpable wrongdoing, we have a duty to withdraw from that practice. Upon further reflection, however, the suggestion that withdrawal is always the right response to complicity is difficult to sustain. And it’s not clear why our complicity is limited to the intentional acts of Facebook’s executives, as opposed to the full spectrum of evils one might attribute to the platform. I take up each issue in turn.
Notice that we participate in all sorts of practices that enable culpable wrongdoing: As Leif Wenar reminds us in his book Blood Oil, almost all of the plastic and gasoline that we buy indirectly supports the Saudi regime and, by extension, the heartbreaking war and famine in Yemen. Here it’s even clearer that the actions we’re supporting cross a “moral red line,” in Liao’s words. But it seems difficult to conclude that we should therefore desist from consuming any and all oil products. Rather, we might think that there are other things we could do to offset or rectify these problems.
We might, for instance, attempt to expose the agents and processes that are directly responsible for these outcomes—the links in the supply chain that connect our purchases to Saudi crimes. We might attempt to help the victims of these crimes, by directing aid to Yemen. And we might agitate politically for policies that will fill these regulatory gaps or hold wrongdoers accountable, such as pushing for sanctions against Saudi Arabia or transparency initiatives to label products made with Saudi oil. Similar things could be said about responses to Facebook’s many shortcomings. Deleting one’s account is surely one option, but it might not be necessary or even sufficient to rectify complicity.
Another important question to consider is whether withdrawing from a practice will actually improve the outcomes, and the extent to which that matters. Given Facebook’s global penetration, a boycott would arguably have to be massive and tenacious to really have an impact. (Though one might believe that boycotts can succeed in their aims without large-scale participation, given the disproportionate impact of negative publicity.) And there’s a case to be made that remaining a Facebook user gives one better opportunities to monitor and contest its policies.
One may dispute these facts. And one may also believe, à la Bernard Williams, that protecting one’s own moral integrity (not letting Facebook’s evils flow through your own agency) is equally or more important than the causal impact of withdrawing. But we can’t make an informed judgment about this case unless we weigh all of these kinds of considerations—or so I think.
Liao’s account raises a further question about what exactly users are complicit in. For Liao, we are complicit in the transgressions of Facebook executives when they engage in blameworthy behavior. One might think our complicity extends more widely, though. Besides the deplorable behavior of Facebook’s leaders, we might also fault the indirect negative effects of a social media platform. Arguably, certain pathologies of social media are not entirely foreseeable and avoidable. Perhaps social media is inherently threatening to democracy: Its anti-democratic echo chambers are inevitable byproducts of this kind of social practice, and even responsible executives may fail to contain these problems. To determine the extent of our complicity here, then, seems to push us to consider the full spectrum of direct and indirect effects of our participation. The “moral red line” test is far too specific.
Wherever one comes down on this case, it’s high time that philosophers pay attention to ethical challenges of digital life and share their insights publicly. I’m grateful to Matthew Liao for modeling how this can be done well.
Ted Lechterman
Ted Lechterman(@tlechtable)is a postdoc at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. His current research addresses how the value of democracy applies to emergent economic practices. An earlier version of this piece was presented at the Centre for Advanced Studies Justitia Amplificata annual conference at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2019.
