English Researched Argument Assignment
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ENG102_MH_V5 | Writing Assignment 5: Researched Argument
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Example 1: Color-Coded Researched Argument Last Name 1
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English Composition II
Researched Argument
2 October 2021
Regulate Facebook
Sometime in the second quarter of 2021, Facebook acquired its 2.89 billionth user. This means the religion of Facebook has
more devotees than Christianity, and the nation of Facebook has more citizens than the earth’s two most populous real
countries, China and India, combined.(1) Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor turned Facebook critic, asserts that a
corporation of Facebook’s scale and influence is unprecedented since the Dutch East India Company (Tucker). Like that 17th
and 18th-century trading behemoth, Facebook has spawned and toppled political movements and transformed nations. Yet, the
platform operates with negligible oversight. Regulation, Facebook’s lobbyists have effectively argued, threatens the culture of
“permissionless innovation” to which it attributes its remarkable growth. Indeed, over the decade that saw Facebook become
the world’s most powerful social media platform, it and the other tech giants lobbied Washington with a relentless lethality that
killed even the limpest regulatory efforts at their first stirrings. Today, it is fair to state that Facebook and the other social media
networks enjoy regulatory freedom afforded to no other major contemporary industry. These conditions, while beneficial to
Facebook’s bottom line, have had disastrous consequences for humanity. Growing calls to regulate Facebook, voiced by
lawmakers on both ends of the political spectrum, must be heeded.(2) Facebook needs regulation because its continued
inability to prevent fake accounts and content abuse on its platform has caused political unrest, humanitarian catastrophe, and
violence against political and ethnic minorities so significantly that without regulation, Facebook will continue to destabilize
democracies and contribute to violence against society’s most vulnerable populations. (3)
Facebook has proven useful to autocrats seeking to unfairly influence elections and to suppress political opposition.(4)
Repeatedly, dishonest campaigns and regimes exploit Facebook’s inability to police fake accounts, its unwillingness to censor
fake news, and its content algorithms, which promote conversation-generating material without regard for its veracity, to amplify
propaganda.(5)This was true in the case of the Philippines, and its president Rodrigo Duterte, a leader linked with death squads
and extrajudicial assassinations (Lamb). In the 2016 election, fake accounts linked with Duterte’s campaign flooded Facebook
with oceans of spurious pro-Duterte content. Thanks to Facebook’s algorithms and non-existent fact-checking, Duterte’s
campaign snowballed on a momentum of amplified falsehoods. According to Laurie Etter, in Bloomberg, in the weeks preceding
the election, Duterte accounted for 64% of all Filipino conversation on the site, even though much of the conversations were
predicated on manifest lies, many originating from Duterte’s own campaign — one promulgated lie, that Pope Francis had
endorsed the candidate, achieved enough saturation to require a statement of denial from the Catholic Bishops of Philippines
(Etter). After using the platform to win the presidency, Duterte turned Facebook against opponents to his domestic agenda. His
online Facebook army spread lies about political rivals, while journalists who covered him unfavorably were targeted for
harassment. Accounts linked to the president, and reportedly funded by his government, attacked one reporter, Nobel recipient
Maria Ressa, with threats of rape and murder. At the height of the operation against her, Ressa reported receiving as many as
90 such messages per hour. (Etter). Duterte’s methods in the Philippines have served as a playbook for leaders in other parts
of the world. For example, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen used Facebook similarly to quell domestic opposition, and the
Irish Times reports accusations of the leader buying fake accounts to boost support in the run up to the 2018 election (Hayden).
Also, in 2020, the Supreme Court of Brazil ordered Facebook to dismantle a disinformation network tied to the Bolsonero
administration (Stubbs and Menn).(6) Facebook claims real-time ignorance of these abuses and points out it stops them when
they are uncovered. (7)These claims are simply not credible. The Guardian reports that Facebook knew for eleven months
before acting that Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernández was inflating, through fake accounts, the popularity of his posts
(Wong and Ernst). Indeed, in the run-up to the Filipino election, three Facebook officials travelled to the Philippines to teach the
Duterte campaign exactly how to best make use of its platform (Etter). Rather, these abuses persist because of what Roger
McNamee refers to as Facebook’s political imperative to align itself with power (Tucker.) We see this not only in Facebook’s
willingness to allow politicians to turn the platform into a disinformation machine but in the company’s complicity in censoring
oppositional content in autocracies like China, Russia, and Turkey (Isaac). In other words, if bad faith political leaders will not
weaponize the platform to distort reality, Facebook will do it for them. (8)
In addition to political crises, Facebook’s repeated failure to curtail hate speech and to police fake accounts has created
humanitarian catastrophes. (4) The platform defines seven types of attacks that fall under the hate speech rubric: calls for
exclusion, calls for violence, calls for segregation, degrading generalization, dismissing, cursing and slurs. Facebook’s
guidelines are clear and sensible enough, but the company inconsistently enforces its own rules.(5) A ProPublica investigation
of over 900 user-submitted examples found an enforcement pattern riddled with inconsistencies and astonishing lapses in
judgement. A user who reported a post showing a photograph of a dead body and the caption “the only good Muslim is a
fucking dead one” received the automated reply: “We looked over the photo, and though it doesn’t go against one of our
specific Community Standards, we understand that it may still be offensive to you and others.” According to the investigation,
over a dozen users reported an antisemitic page called “Jewish Ritual Murder” to no avail. In total, ProPublica presented forty-
nine posts to Facebook and asked the company to defend its judgements; the company acknowledged that its content
reviewers had made the wrong call on twenty-two of them. (Tobin et al.) The ProPublica study is damning, but only examined
English-speaking Facebook. Indeed, the company’s track record is even worse in the developing world. This is particularly so in
parts of the world where global languages, like English, Spanish, or Mandarin, are not used: Facebook’s hate-speech
algorithms only work with a few dominant languages (Perrigo). Elsewhere, hate speech policing is left entirely to users, and
Facebook’s erratic application of its own hate speech rules are further confounded by issues of translation. Worse than
Facebook’s inconsistency is its refusal to act on speech that is clearly leading to violence. Such was disastrously true in
Myanmar, where in 2017 the ruling military junta, running an operation very much like the one led by Rodrigo Duterte in the
Philippines, created a legion of fake accounts to inspire violence against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. Users posing
as fans of pop stars and actors spammed the platform with anti-Muslim content that Facebook permitted — despite the fact that
material overtly encouraged violence and that Facebook could see that many of the posts were originating from the military’s
operating headquarters (Mosur). The operation led to ethnic cleansing — rape, mass murder, and a campaign of mass arson.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar to encampments in neighboring Bangladesh. Sadly, the Myanmar crisis is
not unprecedented. Facebook is implicated in inciting ethnic violence in, among other countries, Cameroon, Sudan, and India.
Nor is Facebook’s irresponsibility confined to fake accounts and harmful language; its live streaming safeguards could not
prevent Brenton Harrison Tarrant from broadcasting, in real time, the murder of fifty-one Muslims during the 2019 massacres at
two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. (6)Facebook’s response to these scandals is fairly predictable: the company will
acknowledge “falling short” or “failing to meet challenges” and change some bit of language in its hate speech definitions or a
new protocol to make reporting violations easier(7) –nothing like the sort of fundamental, systemic changes needed to fix these
problems. Only federal oversight will bring real solutions.(8)
Philippines and Myanmar serve as sobering examples of the sort of chaotic societies that America risks becoming if
Facebook is continued to allow American geopolitical rivals exploit and widen our domestic political divisions.(4)News networks
have made much hay over American intelligence’s consensus that Russia influenced the 2016 election on behalf of then-
candidate Donald Trump, when best estimates state that as many as 126 million people, or one-third of the U.S. population,
saw materials posted on Facebook by Russian troll farms (Weise). However, less attention has been given to Russia’s ongoing
efforts to exploit and widen America’s political division. America’s rivals want us angry and incapable of agreeing about
anything, and exploiting Facebook remains a central method for accomplishing this.(5)In 2020, Facebook removed a network of
fake accounts trying to influence US politics and linked with the Russian Internet Research Agency, the group that very same
group behind the troll farms that influenced the 2016 election (Overly). Russian Fake accounts widen American discord by
feeding false information to whip both ends of the political spectrum into a lather over an astonishingly broad range of subjects.
In 2021, Facebook dismantled another Russian network, this one devoted to disseminating false vaccine information. Russia’s
successes encouraged other American rivals to follow suit: in 2020, China was revealed to be behind a network of fake
accounts using advanced AI to create profile pictures that would evade detection. Chinese intelligence operatives,
masquerading as civilians, created groups boosting American politicians of various party affiliations, where inflammatory, often
false, material was circulated among real American users (Hatmaker) (6). Facebook applauds its efforts against foreign
networks when it uncovers these operations and cites their dismantling as evidence that the company is winning the war on
fake news and troll farms,(7) but the content of these claims is belied by their frequency, which verges on comedy. A police
force force repeatedly arresting arsonists is not evidence of effective policing but of a burning city.(8)
Facebook and its defenders attribute problems of fake accounts and fake news to the company’s size. The business of
Facebook, goes the argument, is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, serving its 2.89 billion users at once.
Operating at that scale, mistakes tend to look pretty big — part of the problem is perspective. Yet Facebook acknowledges fake
news, fake accounts, and hate speech are challenges. In testimony before Congress, Facebook expresses sorrow for the harm
wrought by the abuses on its site but posits itself as a well-intentioned facilitator of connection. They, too, in a sense, its
representatives suggest, are victims: these crimes violate the spirit of what Facebook is all about. “I hear your frustration,”
company representatives say, “these are hard problems, but we’re committed to solving them” (Jankowicz). Invariably, these
solutions take the form of a new transparency or security feature. (7) Inevitably, these solutions fail. They fail because these
abuses involve transparency problems and security lapses but do not fundamentally arise from them. These problems arise
because Facebook is not a well-intentioned facilitator of connection: it is designed to capture human attention and hold it as
long as possible for the purpose of selling advertisements. To that end, Facebook algorithms promote whatever content that is
most likely to provoke a response, be it hateful or funny or false. These problems arise because the spirit of Facebook is that of
any company with a $1.21 trillion dollar market cap: perpetual growth. To that end, Facebook subjects advertisements to risible
scrutiny: in 2018, two years after Russian fake accounts purchased ads on Facebook to influence the election, Vice News
posed as senators, Vice President Pence, and even the Islamic State and attempted to buy one-hundred ads; Facebook took
money for all one hundred (Turton). Facebook allows abuses by the world’s Putins, Dutertes, and Bolsoneros because
company’s wishing to operate in autocracies cannot afford to alienate autocrats.(8)
It is a challenging time for Facebook. The company’s involvement in the high-profile geopolitical scandals and humanitarian
catastrophes mentioned in this paper have battered the platform’s reputation; owing to brand damage, Facebook’s growth in
North America, its most valuable market, has stagnated, and particularly among young users, its most coveted demographic,
who see the platform as a hive of squabbling olds. In the spring of 2020, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg travelled
to Europe. Before audiences at the Munich Security Conference, and in Brussels, lobbying EU lawmakers behind closed doors,
as well as in a coinciding Op Ed published by London’s Financial Times, and in a subsequent Facebook-published white paper,
Zuckerberg began Facebook’s pivot from opposing regulation to calling for it — a move most observers see as a sign of
Facebook bending to the inevitable. Unfortunately, what a cursory reading makes plain is that Zuckerberg’s editorial and
Facebook’s white paper are less a serious plan for averting the platform abuses that have led to human suffering and increased
instability than a cynical attempt to redefine regulation on Facebook’s own terms: a set of unenforceable recommendations with
no legal backing that ensure the platform maintains wholesale immunity while making no changes that threaten its business
model. This is a funhouse mirror version of regulation that benefits none but Facebook. (9)The United States must not accept
Facebook’s version of collaborative regulation but should subject it to meaningful, legally binding oversight because if it does
not, Facebook’s practices will continue to breed mass violence and social unrest, to disseminate false information, to undermine
democracies and elections. (10)Washington must act while Facebook is vulnerable. It might not get another chance.(11)
Works Cited
Etter, Lauren. “What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 7 Dec.
2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-
a-little-help-from-facebook.
Isaac, Mike. “Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back into China.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22
Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html.
Hatmaker, Taylor. “Chinese Propaganda Network on Facebook Used Ai-Generated Faces.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 22 Sept.
2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/22/facebook-gans-takes-down-networks-of-fake-accounts-originating-in-china-
and-the-philippines/.
Jankowicz, Nina. “Opinion | It's Time to Start Regulating Facebook.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 1 Apr. 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/11/15/its-time-to-start-regulating-facebook/.
Lamb, Kate. “Thousands Dead: The Philippine President, the Death Squad Allegations and a Brutal Drugs War.” The Guardian,
Guardian News and Media, 2 Apr. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/philippines-president-duterte-
drugs-war-death-squads.
Mozur, Paul. “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, with Posts from Myanmar's Military.” The New York Times, The New York
Times, 15 Oct. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html.
Overly, Steven. “Facebook Removes Russian Accounts That Targeted Left-Leaning Americans.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 1 Sept.
2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/01/facebook-removes-russian-accounts-left-americans-407167.
Perrigo, Billy. “Facebook's Hate Speech Algorithms Leave out Some Languages.” Time, Time, 28 Nov. 2019,
https://time.com/5739688/facebook-hate-speech-languages/.
Stubbs, Jack, and Joseph Menn. “Facebook Suspends Disinformation Network Tied to Staff of Brazil's Bolsonaro.” Reuters,
Thomson Reuters, 8 July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-disinformation-brazil/facebook-suspends-
disinformation-network-tied-to-staff-of-brazils-bolsonaro-idUSKBN2492Y5.
Tobin, Ariana, et al. “Facebook's Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules Allows Vile Posts to Stay Up.” ProPublica, 28 Dec.
2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enforcement-hate-speech-rules-mistakes.
Tucker, Ian. “Roger McNamee: 'Facebook Is a Threat to Whatever Remains of Democracy in the US'.” The Guardian, Guardian
News and Media, 26 July 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/26/roger-mcnamee-facebook-is-a-
threat-to-whatever-remains-of-democracy-in-the-us.
Turton, William. “We Posed as 100 Senators to Run Ads on Facebook. Facebook Approved All of Them.” VICE, 30 Oct. 2018,
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xw9n3q/we-posed-as-100-senators-to-run-ads-on-facebook-facebook-approved-all-of-
them.
Weise, Elizabeth. “Russian Fake Accounts Showed Posts to 126 Million Facebook Users.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite
Information Network, 1 Nov. 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/30/russian-fake-accounts-showed-
posts-126-million-facebook-users/815342001/.
Wong, Julie Carrie, and Jeff Ernst. “Facebook Knew of Honduran President's Manipulation Campaign – and Let It Continue for
11 Months.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Apr. 2021,
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-honduras-juan-orlando-hernandez-fake-engagement.
1. Hook
2. Background/context
3. Thesis
4. Reason
5. Warrant
6. Evidence
7. Counterclaim
8. Rebuttal
9. Revisit argument
10. Restate thesis
11. Clincher
Last modified: Tuesday, June 7, 2022, 2:28 PM
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