A month ago the novelist Jay Seliger asked “Is there an actual Facebook crisis, or media narrative about Facebook crisis?” After two years of criticism of the company, he noted, its users are still on board. Indeed, you might have to pay them a $1,000 to give up Facebook for one year. Seliger remarks that an earlier New York Times story “reads a lot like a media narrative that has very little to do with users’ actual lives.”
Seliger asserts that Facebook is “a Girardian scapegoat for a media ecosystem that is unable or unwilling to consider its own role” in the election of Donald Trump. (On Rene Girard see this). I don’t know about the culpability of the “media ecosystem,” but the ferocity of the campaign against Facebook suggests something more at work than a concern about privacy and the use of online data.
Many people were horrified and surprised by Trump’s election. But Trump himself, his campaign, and those who voted for him bear responsibility for his election; to be more accurate those who voted for him in a small number of states like Michigan and Wisconsin put him in the White House.
It is difficult to believe that Facebook’s managers were dumb enough to take sides in a presidential campaign, least of all the side of Donald Trump. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, says plausibly that Facebook gave the campaign as much assistance as it would any multi-million dollar advertising customer. The company sent a person to be…
