Taming big tech

Is Facebook harming society?

“Is this perhaps the next big thing?” That was the question a news anchor asked Mark Zuckerberg, back in 2004. Less than three months earlier, he had launched Thefacebook – envisaging it as a directory for his fellow students at Harvard, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent. As Zuckerberg explained to the host, he had hoped that 400 or 500 people would sign up. “Now we’re at 100,000, so who knows where we’re going next... Maybe we can make something cool.” Fast-forward 15 years and Facebook has 2.32 billion users – almost a third of the world’s population. It generated $7bn profits in the past quarter and, with Google, it directly influences more than 70% of internet traffic. Having adopted a strategy of buying its rivals (including Instagram and Whatsapp), it is one of the world’s biggest tech firms. But has Zuckerberg made “something cool”, or something dangerous?

As it celebrated its 15th birthday this week, the company found itself on the defensive, accused – yet again – of putting profits ahead of protecting its users and their privacy. In the US, Techcrunch discovered that the company had been quietly paying people as young as 13 $20 a month to give it access to all the data on their phones; in the UK, it faced growing criticism over its failure to remove harmful content from Instagram, after a number of teenage suicides were linked to the app. A government White Paper on the issue is expected within weeks. Meanwhile, one of its key fact-checking partners, Snopes, hired in response to concerns about the “fake news” spread on Facebook, announced that it had decided not to renew its contract. A Snopes vice-president told The Washington Post that examining the avalanche of stories on Facebook was just too labour-intensive, and that Facebook needed to invest in better digital tools. Two months earlier, Snopes’s fact checkers had been quoted saying that they didn’t think the tech giant was serious about combatting “fake news”, and that they were mainly being used for crisis PR.

Facebook has incredible power, but it is behaving like a spoilt teenager, said Bhaskar Chakravorti on The Conversation – acting irresponsibly and selfishly, and making endless promises to do better, until the next mess is uncovered. Its violations of its users’ trust are legion, and include ignoring its own privacy policies and sharing data without permission. It has allowed the dissemination of propaganda that has sparked violence around the world, and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. There are concerns that it causes its users mental distress, distracts them from more purposeful activities, damages their sense of self-worth and produces symptoms akin to addiction. Small wonder nearly a third of Americans feel that Facebook is bad for society. But as talk grows of regulation, we should remember that Facebook also does good. Zuckerberg’s promise to connect the world has borne fruit: Facebook has been a boon to certain groups (the elderly, shy people, autistic people) who were once socially isolated; it has helped small businesses reach customers in a way that was never before possible; and it has enabled all sorts of grass-roots initiatives, from charity fundraising efforts to social justice campaigns, to take root and flourish. For politicians on all sides, it has become a vital tool, said The Economist: Donald Trump may have gained an edge in the 2016 election because of the fake news peddled on Facebook, but the site also helped Barack Obama raise the funds needed for his White House campaign. Today, many of Trump’s opponents use Facebook to organise themselves. Yet in the wake of this latest privacy scandal, lawmakers in the US are more anxious than ever to rein it in, said Rana Foroohar in the FT. One proposal is to force large platforms to provide, on a regular basis, an estimate of the overall value of the data they harvest from their users. “This is a big deal in the battle between Big Tech and regulators.” User data is the most valuable commodity they have. The tech giants think the public is untroubled by the way their data is used to deliver targeted advertising, seeing it as a small price to pay for the convenience of social media. But I suspect that if they knew precisely how they are being tracked, and how “richly” they are being monetised, there would be “more of a public outcry”.

I’m not sure of that, said Will Oremus on Slate. Last year, #deletefacebook trended on Twitter. Yet the firm’s latest earnings report, released last week, showed not only a growth in profits but also in users, even in the US, where it was thought to have plateaued. “Could it be that all the scandals, all the data leaks, all the underhanded tactics, all the blights on democracy didn’t

matter? That for all the frothing by media talking heads, users simply don’t care about online privacy and never will?”

“There are concerns that it causes its users mental distress and symptoms akin to addiction”