Do we really want a world run by Facebook?

TECHLIFE’S EDITOR WONDERS IF THE TRADE OFF FOR ACCELERATING TOWARDS AN EVER MORE HIGH-TECH FUTURE IS GOING TO BE WORTH IT.

TECH BILLIONAIRES LOOKING to change the world has become a common theme in today’s Silicon Valley culture, with the likes of Telsa’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, in particular, both having pet space-travel projects, and Google even having an entire division dedicated to ‘moonshots’ — i.e. big ideas that probably won’t pay off, but could be huge if they did. And as Western governments’ appetite (and budgets) for forwardlooking projects have shrunk, it’s at least mildly reassuring that someone has taken up the mantle of imagining a brighter future.

There is a trade-off in shifting this power away from governments and on to corporations, however, and that’s something that recently hit home for me when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, published a post explaining where he sees the social network going next. The manifesto, titled ‘Building Global Community’ is a far-roving 6,000 words covering a wide range of topics, although often without a lot of specifics.

The one theme that runs through it all, though, is that it hands over more power to Facebook. Zuck envisions a world where Facebook is the solution to many of our modern ills, be that crushing fake news, encouraging people to get together in the real world, or even bringing about direct democracies, where citizens can vote on important political issues via (of course) Facebook. Coming from a company that’s repeatedly show a disregard for its users, that’s terrifying. Over its 12-year existence, Facebook’s repeatedly been flayed by the public and the media about its handling of users’ privacy (and even now, the options for changing privacy settings are both dense and obscure), it runs tests on subsets of its users including deliberately creating a buggy, crashing version of its Android app to see how many times people would open it before they gave up, and its 2013 attempt to introduce a free internet scheme in India (which was limited to visiting a handful of sites, including Facebook, of course) was ultimately rejected once the country figured out it could actually help to give social giant an unfair or even monopolistic hold on the local market.

There’s a reason that, in the West, we’ve entrusted our governments with holding the kind of powers that Zuckerberg seemingly wants to wield via Facebook — they can be held to account, so they’re at least a little more inclined to do what’s right.

If Zuckerberg really wants to change the world, he should follow Bill Gates’ example — hand the reigns of running Facebook over and devote himself solely to philanthropy. Because honestly, it’s hard to be truly altruistic when you’re always looking out for numero uno first.