Facebook's subtle empire

But Domenech is right that Zuckerberg’s empire still needs vigilant watchdogs and rigorous critiques. True, any Facebook bias is likely to be subtler-than-subtle. But because so many people effectively live inside its architecture while online, there’s a power in a social network’s subtlety that no newspaper or news broadcast could ever match.

In a period of crisis, that subtle power could be exercised in truly disturbing ways: Consider, for instance, the reported conversation at a Facebook meeting about whether the company might have an obligation to intervene against a figure like Donald Trump — something that a tweak of its news algorithm or even its Election Day notification could theoretically help accomplish.

But the more plausible (and inevitable) exercise of Facebook’s power would be basically unconscious — as, I suspect, any suppression of conservative stories may have been.

Human nature being what it is, a social network managed and maintained by people who tend to share a particular worldview — left-libertarian and spiritual-but-not-religious, if I judge the biases of Silicon Valley right — will tend to gently catechize its users into that perspective.