Research Argument

ENG102_MH_V5 | Writing Assignment 5: Researched Argument

Example 1: Color-Coded Researched Argument Last Name 1

First Name Last Name

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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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-

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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.

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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

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10. Restate thesis

11. Clincher

Last modi�ed: Tuesday, June 7, 2022, 2:28 PM

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