Should we be scared of Zuckerberg?
“What is Facebook?” It’s a question that is becoming ever harder to answer, said Will Oremus on Slate. Almost exactly 13 years after its birth, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is now used by 1.86 billion people – a quarter of the global population – and has evolved into the world’s biggest media platform. It is also – as the 2016 US election demonstrated – “a vector for fake news and sensationalism and a force for ideological polarisation”. This appears to have prompted a bout of soul-searching by Zuckerberg. He has embarked on a “listening tour” of America (seen by many as a sign that he is planning to one day run for office); and last week he published a 5,700-word open letter, laying out his vision for Facebook’s future.
It makes for chilling reading, said Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer. The central thrust of Zuckerberg’s manifesto is that humans fare best when they come together. Facebook, he says, will provide the “social infrastructure” to build a stronger “global community”. He wants his company – a “surveillance machine” which already harvests your data, owns your baby photos, and keeps you in a “filter bubble” of news tailored to match your prejudices – to get more involved in both regional and global democracy. He proposes, for instance, organising more “meaningful groups” (those where people with similar interests, such as knitting, or politics, can arrange to meet in the real world); and using Facebook to register voters. Recent elections, he boasts, have shown that “the candidate with the largest and most engaged following on Facebook usually wins”; but he never stops to ask whether that is a good thing. (“Marine Le Pen, with her 1.2 million Facebook followers, might have an answer.”)
Zuckerberg’s vague, jargonfilled letter reveals “an astounding lack of self-awareness,” said Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. He proposes to counter the spread of fake news on Facebook by supporting (he doesn’t say how) the “vital social function” of the news industry. This is the same industry that Facebook and Google are in the process of “gutting”: together, they gobble up 85% of online ad revenue, leaving a mere 15% for actual news organisations to fight for. This means there is no money to pay for investigative reporting, just when we need it most. Zuckerberg clearly aspires to be a great thinker. But his manifesto is nothing more than “the stump speech of a chief executive seeking to expand his empire while studiously avoiding the very large herd of elephants loitering in his living room”.