The death of social media

The tech story of the year has been the realisation that social media uses our personal data for someone else’s financial gain

When George Soros warned at the beginning of 2018 that social media had become a “menace” to society and “obstacles to innovation”, he could scarcely have known his admonitions would be proved so correct, as Facebook imploded in a privacy storm and he himself would became a target.

By the end of this year, whatever positives were left in our opinion of Facebook, the largest communications network the world has yet seen, have long been seared out of us.

Facebook, like humanity, is open to manipulation, deceit, shaming and all our other awful traits. Except it is “at scale”. Facebook has enabled us to “connect” with anyone anywhere, but it has also enabled cyberbullying, antisemitism and election manipulation — all on an unprecedented scale.

This is the year social media turned nasty — or when we realised the problem has been there for years. As Tim Berners-lee, inventor of the world wide web, put it, the big online firms have been able “to weaponise the web at scale”.

In his testimony to US lawmakers, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg was at pains to stress how people could control how they posted to Facebook and who could see it. It was a similar thread to what he said on his apology tour after the Cambridge Analytica story destroyed any innocence in our understanding of social media. His disingenuous “talking point” sums up what has gone wrong with Facebook: though he highlighted the control that users have over who sees their postings, it is the unseen forces that are beyond its users’ control that truly matter. Facebook has “shadow profiles” of the 2.2-billion people who use it. It’s called “controlling the narrative”.

But Facebook has long since lost that battle. And humanity, along the way, has lost its privacy. Our personal data has indeed been weaponised. It’s a modern kind of slavery: our personal preferences, network of friends and all those other things that define us have been handed over to someone else to make money from. Our identities are beyond our control.

Facebook’s cesspool of misogyny, racism and fake news has been exposed, as has the reality that there are two Facebooks: the endless news feed of pointless posts by friends you’ve liked before, fake news, targeted advertising, and the inevitable cat videos – all the result of the algorithms (and previous likes) that Facebook assumes we want to see. It’s a vast echo chamber that has made this global village into a real village – judging by the anti-immigrant, self-serving but short-sighted outcomes of Brexit and the rightwing backlash that was so skilfully manipulated by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US elections.

Then there is the Facebook for the advertisers, the real Facebook where “shadow profiles” have been created in a vast database, often using data we haven’t supplied.

We will be forced to live with the consequences.