It’ll take more than #DeleteFacebook
Enough is enough. We have learned Facebook allowed our likes, our religions, our network of friends to be weaponised in political campaigns. A political marketing firm that worked for the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, is in trouble for what it did with the data.
But what’s really scary is that it didn’t have to hack into anything to get it. Facebook was designed to collect all that info and handed it over without policing how it was being used. Now Facebook’s having an overdue existential crisis about being a spy machine.
I understand how quitting might feel satisfying. You’d no longer be adding to Facebook’s data trove. They can’t win if you’re not playing their game.
But Facebook isn’t like other products you boycott. Last year’s #DeleteUber movement, which attracted an estimated 200,000, helped drive a management change at the start-up because it hit Uber’s bottom line. We don’t buy products from Facebook – we are its product. We’ve given it our information for free.
It’s true that Facebook needs our eyeballs to sell ads to marketers and is attuned to how much time people spend looking at its apps. But you quitting – or even 200,000 people quitting – wouldn’t make much of a dent in its 2.2 billion sets of eyeballs. It would take tens of millions of members to #DeleteFacebook to have an effect.
And while it’s easy to press the button to quit Facebook, it’s spectacularly difficult in practice. Facebook has a hold on us because of its network effect: Even if you don’t like Facebook, you might still need it to stay in touch with your mum, your second cousin or even your boss. They’d have to quit too. Many people rely on Facebook to sign into other websites, dating services and other apps.
There aren’t great alternatives, either. Several of the most popular other social apps – Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – are also owned by Facebook. People peeved at Facebook’s data practices have tried making new services, but none took off.
Aside from a dramatic change of heart from founder Mark Zuckerberg, getting Facebook to reform what data it collects and how it uses it requires destabilising its business. And that boils down to this: Making Facebook an unreliable or expensive way for marketers to reach us.
‘‘The only way a boycott will be effective is if it creates enough reputational damage that regulation becomes a reasonable option or if advertisers leave en masse,’’ says Brayden King, a professor at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management.
Some big advertisers have already walked up to the line with Silicon Valley. Unilever – one of the world’s largest advertisers, and the company behind brands from Dove to Hellman’s – recently threatened to pull ads from Google and Facebook because of ‘‘toxic content.’’
Option B is more of a hammer: If governments force Facebook to change the way it uses data, advertisers may become less enamoured with Facebook because it won’t be as effective.
The world will soon get one kind of control from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which requires more transparency from companies about the data they collect and how they use it.
The regulation question is: What exactly should change? Many ideas will be floated in the months ahead. One intriguing argument is that policing data is more than just a Facebook problem, so we need an independent agency to deal with it.
We’ve allowed a data-gathering industry to flourish with few consequences and responsibilities. Now we’re learning just how badly that can end up. And quitting Facebook won’t solve the bigger problem. The biggest consumer challenge of our era calls for a broader consumer movement.
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