Discover more from BIG by Matt Stoller
Facebook Made Up to $2.9 billion from QAnon in 2020
The fight over disinformation is not about censorship, it's about dollars.
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The business model of Facebook is dangerous, and encourages addictive content and conspiratorial content. While I’m not a fan of banning people from social networks, I do think there’s an interesting question about why Facebook didn’t act to boot QAnon before the election.
One rumor is that had Facebook done so, executives were afraid of losing users to conservative social networks Parler and Gab, which would in turn limit Facebook’s ad revenue. This led to me to the question, how much money has Facebook made from its moderation choice to retain QAnon groups? Exact amounts of money are impossible to know without Facebook’s internal data, but it’s possible to do a back of the envelope guess on why Facebook did not want to purge its networks of conspiracy theories.
According to NPR, 17% of Americans believe in the core tenet of QAnon. Let’s say that half of them, or 8% of Americans, had moved on from Facebook, as happened to MySpace when a more compelling social network emerged. As of 2020, Facebook had 258 million users in the U.S. and Canada, and its average revenue per user was $163.86. Let’s pretend no one in Canada buys into QAnon, so we’re talking 220 million American Facebook users. That means Facebook feared losing 17.6 million users if they banned QAnon content, which is a loss of roughly $2.9 billion of ad revenue in 2020.
Obviously this calculation is rough, and it’s not clear that anyone would leave Facebook if it banned QAnon. Still, my guess is that someone at Facebook made the calculation about how much such a move *might* cost them. It would be irresponsible not to, considering that the firm told its investors that its user base in the U.S. declined slightly in the third and fourth quarters, and that declining engagement of users is an investment risk. “A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline,” Facebook’s 2020 annual report warned, “in some cases precipitously.”
Facebook has substantial market power, so I doubt they’d lose users if they did take a more aggressive line on moderation. But that said, it’s a paranoid company with an obsessive desire to retain user engagement. And they probably figured, why take the risk?
Facebook Made Up to $2.9 billion from QAnon in 2020
Speaking of Facebook, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion today in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, a case that challenged the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), 47 U.S.C. § 227. If you don’t like robocalls and robotexts, this April Fool’s joke is on you. Because Facebook won, it’s open season on your cellphone now. The ripples from this won’t just open the spigot on unlimited robotexts. Now anyone can legally robocall your cellphone hundreds or thousands of times a day, and no law can stop them.
You think you can’t answer a call now from an unknown number without talking to a third-world scammer trying to sell you an auto warranty or a scam lender you never heard of who calls herself "Rachel" and offers to refinance your credit card? Just see what happens now that Facebook has won. All hell will break loose on your cellphone all day every day. Anyone could legally robocall or robotext your cellphone hundreds of times a day and no one can stop them. You can thank Facebook for this outrage.
You can also thank the gutless, corporate-captured U.S. Congress. They could’ve fixed this problem last year when they were debating the TRACED Act, originally called the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act. (As if there are any good robocalls?) While considering that bill, New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone wanted to add two sentences to the TCPA to clarify that predictive dialers, the kind of calling system that all scofflaw telemarketers use today, which dial numbers from a database, are "automatic telephone dialing systems" under 47 U.S.C. § 227 and thus illegal. But Pallone’s bill went to a committee to synchronize the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, and lobbyists for the banking industry killed his fix of the TCPA.
You can see Pallone's proposed fix to the autodialer definition – the one that the bank lobbyists killed – at the PDF linked below, page 2, section 2(a)(1): “The term ‘robocall’ means a call made (including a text message sent)....”
https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/PALLONE_0.pdf
It was the easiest fix imaginable – a couple of new sentences to the text of the statute for 47 U.S.C. § 227. The problem that Palone’s language would have fixed is that the imprecise definition of an illegal ATDS in 47 U.S.C. § 227 has not been updated since 1991, when telephone technology was simpler. This has caused endless problems and a circuit split in the federal courts that led to the Supreme Court hearing Facebook v. Duiguid.
Here's the problem: In 1991, autodialers only worked by dialing phone numbers sequentially or randomly. Today, no one uses a sequential or random autodialer. Instead, every telemarketer worth his or her offshore salt uses a “predictive dialer” into which they load thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of phone numbers and then pulls them into the dialer to call them: dialing from a database. The 1991 language that legally defines an autodialer – sequentially or randomly – doesn’t describe predictive dialers, so after today's SCOTUS decision, they’re legal everywhere, even if they make millions of unwanted calls a day. So you can thank our gutless Congress for that.
You can also thank the Washington State Democratic Central Committee. Last May, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge to the TCPA in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, brought by the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, a Tea Party political action committee, and three other political groups who think it’s just terrible that they can’t flood your cellphone during campaign season with text messages.
It’s a “free speech” issue, they said. I always thought free speech was when you set up a soap box in your local park or its print or online equivalent and had your say about some issue that bugs you. The American Association of Political Consultants apparently think free speech is setting up a soapbox on your cellphone to invade the privacy of your kitchen, living room, bedroom, or bathroom at any hour of the day or night. You can thank them, too.
Just remember, the U.S. Supreme Court decided as it did today because the banksters want to call tens of thousands of people like you per hour with autodialers, and Big Tech and every politician in this country want to send unlimited text messages to your cellphone. Even Bernie’s people send text messages unbidden to your phone.
Worst of all, this is not an outlier decision by the Supreme Court. It’s a strict constructionist’s dream decision. Our gutless Congress left them no choice, given the statutory text that Congress could’ve easily fixed last year or at any time in the last 20 years.
If you want to be a Duguider, write your congressperson and senator and tell them to fix the law by adding congressman Pallone’s easy fix to the TCPA. Otherwise, get ready to be robocalled and robotexted all day, every day.