National Post (National Edition)
GOVERNMENTS NEED TO TAKE ON FACEBOOK.
This is the latest in a series of articles on Big Tech’s damage to democracy, public safety and consumers.
Facebook is the world’s most troublesome tech giant and its sketchy history began with funds and advice from Russian tech investor Yuri Milner on behalf of Kremlin-linked oligarchs and companies.
In 2009, Milner paid $200 million to buy only two per cent of the startup Facebook. In 2012, Facebook went public for $104 billion (unjustifiable at the time) and the Russians cashed out for $6 billion. Now worth $700 billion in market value, Facebook has grown to 2.6 billion users and $70.7 billion in advertising-related revenues, and is at the centre of Silicon Valley’s biggest controversies involving ethics, breaches of privacy and content fraud.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg remains a friend of Milner’s, whose investment fund went on to buy pieces of Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and others. In 2009, Milner explained “we have a unique perspective on this (social media) investment. “We see something that other people don’t see, because we see the monetization profiles of our other social networks in our (Russian) part of the world.”
The result is Facebook has become to technology what Russia is to geopolitics: a slippery, intrusive, and often unethical player. The company flouts regulations, taxes, imposes censorship for totalitarian regimes, and provides a platform for lies, fraud, hate language, and questionable organizations or individuals. And Zuckerberg bobs and weaves past critics and regulators with the skill of a Pravda spokesman.
It’s a problem that governments must address but don’t very well. For instance, Facebook agreed to respect user privacy just before its 2012 IPO, but didn’t. In 2019, Facebook was charged for privacy breaches seven years after promising the Federal Trade Commission to desist. It was hit with a record fine of US$5 billion ($6.8 billion), only a fraction of one year’s profits. It also faces another $1.63 billion in Europe for the same misdeeds.
This year, Facebook also agreed to pay US$550 million ($745 million) to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois (which has a strict Biometric Information Privacy Act) over privacy violations involving its facial recognition tool that allowed users to spy on one another through photographs. It was also sued for US$9 billion in unpaid taxes offshore by the IRS.
None of this fazes Zuckerberg. When called onto the carpet in 2018 — over Facebook’s major role in contaminating the Brexit vote outcome — he refused to appear before parliament or to surrender archival information. Similar criticism in the U.S. about Russian and white supremacist Facebook posts and ads that influenced the 2016 election were greeted with surprise and nothing much else.
Recently, Zuckerberg ridiculed Twitter’s crackdown on Trump inaccurate tweets and said his company would not be “the arbiter of truth.” This led to a boycott by 500 major advertisers (such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Starbucks, Verizon) and a virtual strike by Facebook employees.
On June 25, word leaked out that Zuckerberg’s “team” conceded they suffered from a “trust deficit” and were reaching out to advertisers and reviewing their policies. Then, on July 8, a report by civil rights auditors hired by Facebook slammed the company for providing a home to disinformation and hate, and opening the door to abuse by politicians.
Then by July 1, an unapologetic Zuckerberg told a town hall meeting of Facebook employees that the company was “not gonna change” as a result of the boycott. He added, cynically, that the boycott was merely a “reputational” issue, involved a small per cent of revenue, and would end “soon enough.” Facebook stock bounced back from a $60-billion drop.
On July 10, reports were that Facebook was considering a temporary ban on political ads in the final days of the November election in the U.S. — presumably to grapple with advertising and employee unrest. This did not satisfy critics.
But more bobbing and weaving will occur. He resists any curbs on “political” speech, or content in general, no matter how false or dangerous in democracies. But in dictatorships where it does business, Facebook censors to please authorities.