Facebook’s bad behavior
It was tempting to imagine during Monday’s Facebook outage that even the social media giant’s algorithms were ashamed of its behavior. But such a sense of conscience is, of course, in the realm of of science fiction when it comes to Facebook’s computers, and wishful thinking when it comes to its executive suite.
Thousands of pages of documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen portray a corporation governed more by the pursuit of eyeballs and revenue than a sense of social responsibility. The documents, reporting by The Wall Street Journal, and accounts by Ms. Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who dealt with civic integrity issues, reveal a stunning disregard for the damage its practices have both on users and societies.
We’ve learned, for example, that Facebook’s research found that its Instagram service causes anxiety, stress, and mental health problems in a significant number of teens — including worsening body image issues for one in three teenage girls. Facebook, meanwhile, has been moving ahead with plans for Instagram Youth to attract an even younger audience.
By Ms. Haugen’s account on 60 Minutes this past weekend, Facebook also abandoned a civic integrity team it had established after damaging revelations about how it monetized its user data to sell during the 2016 election — data sold without users’ knowledge and used to influence a number of elections around the world, including in the United States, where 69 percent of the population is on Facebook.
Why? The company has found that incendiary disinformation keeps people agitated — and keeps them coming back to Facebook regularly.
Facebook’s answer? The studies aren’t conclusive. The company does good things, too.
Sound familiar? A company that knows its product causes harmful effects, downplays its own research, and enhances the harmful effects in an effort to keep people using the product? It’s hardly hyperbolic to compare Facebook, as Sen. Ed Markey, D-mass, has, to Big Tobacco.
What’s to be done? Government regulation of the social intercourse of millions of Americans raises constitutional issues of free speech and freedom of association. At the same time, Facebook has demonstrated time and again that it is incapable of policing itself.
Breaking up this growing behemoth through anti-trust action is certainly one possibility, but that could just result in so many smaller miscreant social media companies.
Stronger incentives to at least not do the wrong thing would help. Facebook could, for example, be required to be more transparent when it comes to political advertising and its use of user data both internally and in the marketplace.
And the company could be motivated to better monitor its content by removing its protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which absolves it of responsibility for what users post. If there were real, significant consequences for allowing disinformation, Facebook just might rethink its practices.
As far as we know, programmers aren’t capable — yet — of giving computers a conscience, but they can simulate one. That may be the best Congress can do with Facebook.