Facebook’s licence to print cash is now a curse

The social media giant has promised to change, but it will struggle to abandon its addictive model

Facebook wants you to know that it is changing. Its ads tell you so. Its high-profile PR hires tell you so. The mea-culpas of its Instagram executives following Molly Russell’s death tell you so. So, too, does its claimed willingness to submit to “meaningful regulation” after yesterday’s damning House of Commons report about the spread of fake news.

Perhaps most significantly, its move towards creating its own supreme court tells you so, too. This “oversight board”, some 40 strong, independent, and able to deliver landmark decisions on what kind of content is or isn’t acceptable on the social media network, sounds like a game changer.

Certainly, it is an admission of what we all instinctively knew: that, like it or not, Facebook is as much “publisher” as “platform”, and must take some responsibility for the content it disseminates. The truth of this has been made apparent in the most devastating way: not by legal fiat, but by public opprobrium. Appalling content – whether terrorist rant or Russian-funded nonsense – has come to represent a potentially existential, reputational threat to the company. No wonder it wants to be seen to be bustling about.

Of course, there is scepticism about the proposed oversight board: that it will be a fig leaf for business as usual; that its supposed independence is bunk; that it will merely concentrate power in a new set of hands. And there is debate about whether Facebook really is serious about change. Damian Collins MP, whose committee published yesterday’s report, thinks not: “Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions.”

But whether or not Mark Zuckerberg thinks it important to flatter Mr Collins with a personal appearance in Westminster, Facebook’s CEO has certainly grasped the importance of signalling a new, ethical approach. Change, or be changed, is the threat. And Facebook would rather be ahead of the game.

Unfortunately, reforming its governance structures is only one part of the problem. The other part is, arguably, much bigger. And it makes you wonder whether Facebook is, in fact, initiating a tactical retreat – giving ground where it can afford to, while deflecting attention from its true weak spot.

That weak spot is what the brilliant British academic Stuart Russell calls “the click-through catastrophe”. This is the fact that social media networks want you to click on things because, as Russell puts it, “that’s how they get paid” (or, in Zuckerberg’s famously pithy description of Facebook’s business model before a US committee: “Senator, we run ads.”)

As a result, social media networks developed algorithms to find out what you liked and send you more of it. This led to a problem: what consumers wanted was not fixed. Humans can be influenced. Our preferences change. So algorithms didn’t just satisfy our tastes, they changed those tastes.

In the case of politics, that meant algorithmically driven content moved readers’ opinions, even as they catered to them. It was an entirely unintended consequence, but critical, none the less, because all algorithms cared about was drumming up the most clicks. And the most reliable way of doing so, it turns out, was to move punters to the political extremes.

So apolitical algorithms designed to serve existing preferences became highly political machines for pushing people to new preferences, more extreme than before. The effects, says Russell, have been “really pernicious”. “Billions of people have been modified in their political beliefs as a result.”

This is a problem that Facebook is already addressing with better, more responsible algorithms. But it is also about human nature operating at massive scale. And changing that is much harder.

Oversight board or no, Facebook is still in the business of dominating attention among unprecedented numbers of us. And, as its algorithms know, fringe content is indisputably a great way of doing that. They will be perfecting other ways of exploiting human nature even now. Will Facebook really sacrifice such sure-fire drivers of growth, users and revenue?

The stakes are about to get far higher with the advent of “deep fake” technologies that allow easy, undetectable manipulation – audio or video – of any public figure you like. As it becomes impossible to tell whether what we see and hear is real or faked, the medium which delivers news becomes the critical guarantor of truth. You will believe something because it’s in the Telegraph or on Radio 4. But Facebook? Will we trust Facebook?

The company knows it needs to change. The problem is that its world-beating, eyeball-grabbing model needs to change with it. That is quite something to turn your back on. It’s like admitting that the ability to transform everything you touch into gold is a curse. Unlike Midas, however, Zuckerberg can choose to do just that. It might make Facebook poorer in the near future. But at least it will have a future.