Zuck & Congress
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress for the first time, answering questions about how his company protects its users’ privacy and data. Let’s hope the hearings produce more light than heat.
Of course, the politicians will try to posture, and Zuckerberg may aim to evade rather than give real answers on real issues.
Many Democrats, in particular, surely want to divert the topic to whether Facebook helped President Trump “steal the election,” with Russian bots spreading fake news and/or the abuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica.
Russian meddling is a real issue, but all evidence suggests it aimed far more at deepening America’s divisions than at helping any candidate. The ads and posts weren’t even targeted at swing-state voters.
As for the data on millions of people that wound up in the hands of Trump-allied Cambridge Analytica: The company says it deleted it years ago when asked to, and has volunteered to undergo a forensic sweep of its computers. Anyway, Cambridge had nothing magical: The firm worked against Trump for Ted Cruz in the primaries, with no success.
Yes, Team Trump made far better use of Facebook than Team Clinton, as an internal Facebook white paper obtained by Bloomberg notes: “Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook,” $44 million from Trump and $28 million from Clinton in JuneNovember 2016. “But Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize outcomes.”
That simply goes to the competence of the two operations — as it did in 2012, when President Barack Obama’s folks won media praise for their clever use of the social-media giant.
In the end, all these issues go to a far larger problem: Facebook’s need to collect data on millions of people so advertisers can target their audiences, and to “optimize” your feed to keep your eyes coming back to it, ads and all.
That is, how its business model is in stark conflict with all its happy talk about privacy and being a “neutral platform.” The latest privacy mess came with last week’s news that 87 million users likely had their data “scraped” — followed by yet another round of promises to do better.
Fine: Everyone should know by now that social media is more public than private. But few who sign up expect their lives to be picked apart as Facebook’s platform tests their reactions to posts and catalogues the minutiae of their lives.
The company has to do that, COO Sheryl Sandberg more or less said on the “Today” show Friday: If users want to opt out of advertising, they’d have to pay: “Our service depends on your data.”
Even that’s a dodge. Facebook might well survive by charging, say, $20 a month — but it would lose lots of users, especially in less-wealthy nations, and couldn’t be what Zuckerberg calls “a service that helps connect everyone in the world.”
More important, it wouldn’t have the prospect of ever-larger future revenues as it continues to upgrade its ad-placing algorithms. Its stock price would plummet.
As for “neutrality,” it’s a simple fact that Facebook has time and time again tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to show you less of what your friends share from other media companies — and to favor “sponsored content” posts.
And it started doing that long before anyone had heard of the “fake news” problem.
In another vein, Zuckerberg has talked of censoring user content by having Facebook make “the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”
If he shows the same humility in front of Congress, the hearings will get fiery indeed.