Democracies can’t easily fix Facebook
Lawmakers lack expertise in digital regulation, notes Jeffrey Roy.
Over the past week, besieged by bad press and the prospect of fleeing users, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg grudgingly embraced traditional media to defend his new media empire.
He acknowledged the company’s importance in democracy, pointing to upcoming elections in the United States, Brazil and India (to name but three). How has it come to be that a 33-year-old billionaire is viewed as imperilling not only individual privacy but also the legitimacy of democracy itself ?
As a company, Facebook has been wildly successful, surpassing a market capitalization of $500 billion. More than five million companies now run ads on Facebook each month — and political actors do so as well. Advisers to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spoken openly about the importance of such advertising in 2015, especially in mobilizing younger voters.
The current Facebook controversy stems from information gathered on millions of Facebook users that was given to a British-based academic and then sold (unbeknownst to Facebook, the company claims) to Cambridge Analytica, a private analytics firm that aided the Trump presidential campaign. This incident, coupled with wider Russian meddling, has fuelled suggestions that Facebook might have inadvertently helped to elect Trump.
Such claims were initially dismissed as “crazy” by Zuckerberg. Yet even before the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Zuckerberg vowed to “fix Facebook” in 2018. In response to the most recent “major breach of trust,” he has doubled down on this promise, although his company now faces a quagmire of investigating past practices, pacifying governments, and adapting to new threats.
Is it sensible to rely upon the efforts of one company when there are widening systemic risks for countries and globalizing society alike? The answer clearly is no. While Facebook has commercial incentives for acting more responsibly (having lost more than $50 billion in market value already), public regulation of the social media space is long overdue, something Zuckerberg insists he welcomes.
In setting the rules, however, governments face many hurdles. First, most lawmakers and regulatory bodies lack expertise in a new media landscape built upon constant technological disruption. While many in the U.S. Congress and U.K. Parliament anxiously await an opportunity to publicly grill Facebook executives, developing new regulatory mechanisms will prove complex and laborious.
Secondly, political parties and elected officials may lack objectivity, given their own digital dependencies. Trump’s data operations, for example, were inspired by the efficacy of prior Obama campaigns. In Canada, past links between the Canadianborn whistleblower in the Cambridge Analytica affair and the Liberal party have now been widely reported. Once in power, social media underpins both policy messaging and partisan branding.
Yet it is the third challenge that is the most profound: namely a democratic malaise stemming from a digital ethos that accentuates freedom over responsibility and immediate distraction over sustained discourse. Notwithstanding a minority of privacy zealots (including our provincial and federal commissioners — who nonetheless have no jurisdiction over political parties), our own laxness online with respect to privacy and data security deepens this ethos and erodes collective trust in institutions both private and public.
CBC journalist Nora Young foretold this plight in her 2012 book, The Virtual Self. Young called upon individuals to become “data activists” in order to both understand data sharing and demand greater accountability. Such a concept seems notably out of step in a world of ubiquitous devices and constant connectivity and the result is what an American academic, Tina Nabatchi, has described as a “citizenship and democratic deficit.”
Any democratic redress will be an immense undertaking, although there are some modestly encouraging signs. Social media companies are growing up and facing immense pressure to step up (as trust and profitability are interlinked). This year, moreover, the European Union is introducing tough new digital privacy provisions; meanwhile, Facebook is working with public authorities on a Canadian Election Integrity Initiative for 2019.
Yet, more must be done, beginning with a wider conversation on our democratic evolution. Social media platforms and reimagined democratic forums must be viewed as having distinct purposes and unique value propositions, with alignment rather than integration the necessary goal. Zuckerberg may be front and centre at the moment, but we all have an important role to play in ensuring democratic resilience.