The Zeitgeist of Our Age: A Tale of Two Tech Ads

Before the Log4j vulnerability crisis took over all tech news in December 2021, I had the intention of publishing a thematic series of posts based on the notion that so many things in life today seem almost the polar opposites as we remember.  The John Birch Society is mimicking Russian propaganda.  Maybe it always did, but we can trace such current nonsense back to Facebook and the Russian hacker and influence gangs who hangout there.  ED NOTE: I don't link to such content.  The link here is to a generic Wikipedia article.

What really got me thinking about how upside down things seem in so many ways in our culture and society is how odd is a comparison of 2 advocacy ads making the rounds on cable news, at least that's where have seen them, that advocate for or against an issue or issues in IT.

The first ad shows an earnest young man dressed in blue jeans and a blue work shirt.  So we know immediately that our interlocutor is a "blue collar worker."  He is after all wearing a blue work shirt with a pocket protector, no less.  In said pocket protector are some tools of what might used in his trade.  Our speaker is clearly located in some kind of machine shop.

His message is a simple one:  Don't let Congress send tech jobs overseas to China, like they did to my job.  Now, as I mentioned, he is in a machine shop.  Looks all the way like he works, indeed belongs, there.

Now, it must be pointed out for comparison and contrast here, that there is no pending legislation mentioned in this ad.  In fact, if you do a search on the subject you will find several bills pending in one form or another in Congress concerning tech jobs.  The tech industry is constantly lobbying for more H1B visas allowed to bring more programmers to America because this is where the programming is done, and there is just not enough American coders to fill the need.  As manufacturing goes, for as long as any of us can remember on the back of our IT hardware is the Made In China sticker or plate somewhere.  This includes much of the light industrial machinery seen as props in the ad.

As an advocacy ad, this ad neither succeeds nor fails because it advocates for nothing.  My way of judging the success or failure of an ad for anything is can you remember fairly clearly what the ad was for or against.  This ad simply implores viewers to call Congress and tell them to Stop Sending Tech Jobs To China.  No bill.  No legislation.  No proposal.  Really it's quite Zen, if you want look at it that way.  Well, sort of.

Contrast that with a series of advocacy ads featuring various young, mid-level, middle management types from Facebook.  These are real tech workers.  This you can tell because these workers we could label no-collar workers.  Each has a ming-boggling title of pure psychobabble, something like: "I am the Vice-Assistant Managing Director of Content Manipulation and Mind Control for the Sub-tween to Fifteen Year Old Female Sub-demographic Group.  And I am here to say Congress Please Stop Us Before We Make Another Young Person Suicidal, Homicidal, or Both!"  Of course, I exaggerate here, but only a little.

What  Facebook is advocating for here is specifically a revision of 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material.  
Section 230 specifically holds Internet websites are not liable for bad outcomes that arise from material posted on their webpages.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the internet’s most important and most misunderstood laws. It’s intended to protect “interactive computer services” from being sued over what users post, effectively making it possible to run a social network, a site like Wikipedia, or a news comment section.

And the lack of accountability inherent in Section 230 is what Facebook advocates needs to change. 

Essentially what Facebook wants is for Section 230 to be modified so that companies are held liable for illegal content on their platforms unless they can demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying it. And that’s not all. Since that point in time, Facebook has rolled out a full-blown advocacy campaign lobbying for its own regulation, even running ads on influential platforms like the New York Times.

Now there many pros and cons concerning Facebook's sincerity here.  In testimony before Congress, and in a written statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified:

That the immunity granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for third-party posts should be conditioned on platforms adhering to best practices for removing unlawful content. “Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it,” the CEO told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Facebook advocacy ads argue that we, i.e. Facebook's, content moderators should not have not to decide what content is definitely harmful, might be harmful, and what is merely tacky and in bad taste.  Congress needs to set the boundaries.  Stop US Before We Cause Someone To Kill Again! is what these Facebook advocay ads proclaim.  At least, that's my take on Facebook series of ads on the topic.

The point here is how odd it is to have a real tech company and its real employees arguing for some parts of their business model be regulated by Government by endorsing specific legislative action.  Meanwhile, the blue collar actor prattles on about something that doesn't exist.  In a past life, the blue collar worker would be arguing for unionization or some other kind of business regulation, and the tech people would be telling Congress to keeps its Socialist Government Mind and Product Control out of our boardroom!  But not in our backasswards world.

And, in so many ways, backasswards seems to be the Zeitgeist of Our Age.

Gerald Reiff