Does Facebook Even Know How to Control Facebook?

Later today, executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter will go before the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify about the ways that Russian operatives used these platforms to plant and spread disinformation, and generally wreak havoc on the 2016 presidential election.

There will be plenty of discussion of the specifics of the troll campaigns—which could have reached 126 million users on Facebook alone—as well as how the companies hunted down the evidence they have so far. Expect Virginia Senator Mark Warner to give them hell.

The companies will argue that the scale of the interference was small and that it was unlikely to have swung the election. “This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004 percent) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content,” wrote Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, in prepared testimony to the committee.

They’re also likely to argue that, in any case, there’s not much that they could have done to stop Russian trolls without unduly affecting the public sphere now orbiting their advertising machines.

Based on what we know, these are not unreasonable positions. There was so much chaos and misinformation on these platforms in the run-up to the election, it probably would be hard to disentangle the independent effects of Russian agents from all the scammers, hucksters, self-made pundits, opportunists, conspiracy theorists, activists, citizens, and partisan media businesses.

But that should make us step back and enlarge the question: If this is what electoral campaigns look like online, and especially on the largest social platform, Facebook, then what can be done about that?

Put simply: Is Facebook too big to work?

* * *

When I say Facebook, I don’t mean exclusively the corporate entity, Facebook Inc. While Facebook has built the system, it