Facebook’s Egyptian river problem – they’re in denial
OPINION: One of the downsides of the move to digital news media is the demise of the cartoons, or ‘‘funnies’’.
Although a few still survive in newspapers, they have no place in digital editions. By contrast, less than a generation ago cartoon strips dominated the back pages of a newspaper – with titles like
and
My favourite was Charles Schulz’s
featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
One of the more memorable strips has Linus telling Charlie Brown not to worry and that ‘‘no problem is so big or so complicated it can’t be run away from’’.
It’s stuck in my mind, because of the human tendency to ignore or retreat from problems rather than address them. And the tragic comedic notion that denial is a sustainable option.
For the team at Facebook, it seems to have been a mantra in recent years when it came to managing issues around trust, privacy and fake news. Mind you, it hasn’t stopped the social media juggernaut from amassing 2.2 billion active monthly users.
By the end of 2017, Facebook founder
MIKE O’DONNELL
Mark Zuckerberg felt enough was enough. At the start of this year he announced 2018 would be the year that he focused on fixing Facebook. Not just from a corporate point of view, but it would be his personal challenge for the year.
The fix, he said, would be a broad one and address issues such as hate messaging, platform interference by nation states and the likes of fake news. It would also reflect a return to delivering on the Facebook mission to ‘‘give people the power’’.
The first place I started noticing changes was in the approach to news consumption and quality validation. They trialled an ‘‘explore’’ tab to bucket news content into, and they also started a project to verify claims in news.
This involves providing information on the publisher in their posts, and also using third parties to validate the quality and credibility of news publishers. Thus a story from National Public Radio might make it through the filter whereas a piece from Infowars might not.
Small steps but, together with a greater tendency to publicly admit their shortcomings, an apparently genuine attempt to put things right when it came to integrity.
Then whammo! Last week it all went to custard.
It turns out that a specialist UK lobby firm, Cambridge Analytica, had clandestinely accessed and retained information on 50 million Facebook members. This is the same firm that helped Donald Trump win the presidential primaries by use of targeted data.
Facebook found out that the newspaper had uncovered the story and was preparing to publish.
In an attempt to seize the high ground before the story went public, Facebook sent legal letters to the media trying to argue that the 50 million person leak wasn’t technically a data breach. And by the way, they reserved the right to sue. Fortunately the and the
ignored the threats, and published anyway.
Two days later Facebook’s chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, went on the rampage on Twitter, again arguing that the passing across of personal information of 50 million Facebook users by a university lecturer to Cambridge Analytica did not constitute a data breach.
He went on to dig a deeper hole for himself and Facebook with five other tweets before suddenly deleting the lot. Not that it made it any difference, as the tweets had been screen-captured and shared thousands of times.
The news then came out that Stamos was to be leaving Facebook, though it was apparently unrelated to the tweets. Yeah right.
Not only did the news media respond, but the markets did. Facebook shares dropped 8 per cent with heavy volumes. Meanwhile there are reports that more is to come in terms of data released for one purpose being used by another.
There are 2.9 million Facebook users in New Zealand. I wonder how many of them have agreed to share their personal data for one purpose, only to have it repurposed for other ends? And do Facebook undertake any compliance activity to know the answer?
Standing back a little, this seems like a return to form. And to quote Linus, a belief that there is no problem so big you can’t run away from it. Whether that means threatening to sue to stop a story or denying that 50 million user profiles ending up with a lobbyist company is a data breach.
When Zuckerberg made a public promise to fix Facebook in 2018, he prefaced it saying ‘‘the world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do’’.
I reckon after the events of the past week and the further loss of confidence, that work has about doubled. And that’s not peanuts.
❚ Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director and writer. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he’d like to see Facebook making it simpler for companies to work with them.