Social media must be more transparent
Breaking up Facebook won’t work. We need new laws to rein it in
Facebook is now Meta. That was the big, slightly strange announcement made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s Connect event this week. As he interacted with virtual versions of both himself and his colleagues, Zuckerberg went on to suggest that Facebook is now all in on the “metaverse” — a collection of technologies meant to form a virtual world in which we will meet, socialize, and shop, and that the social network’s CEO believes is the next big thing.
Hence the name change. Like Google becoming Alphabet, Meta will now be the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and its virtual reality and other subsidiaries.
The announcement, though, comes at a funny time. This week also saw the release of the Facebook Papers, a collection of documents leaked to a consortium of journalists full of troubling revelations about the company that is out in the world. The odd timing is both a sign that Facebook is doing its best to tamp down on the ensuing controversy, and that there is excellent reason to be wary of the metaverse and, to be frank, much of what Facebook does.
Among the more damning accusations: that Facebook chooses user engagement over user safety; that it has been ineffective in combating radicalization on the platform; that Facebook was part of the foment of violence in India, Ethiopia, in Israel and Palestine and elsewhere; that the company was caught off guard by vaccine information; and much, much more.
The picture painted is one of a sprawling company that is constantly reacting to harms it causes, poorly implementing advice from its own researchers or just not at all, and that is internally at odds with its sunny public image as the Silicon Valley success story.
Take a step back, however, and the larger picture is one of a company whose sheer scale and influence leads to it have social responsibilities that are constantly in conflict with its business model. And, more than anything, that is the trouble with Facebook — and also why half-hearted calls to regulate it are unlikely to do enough to rein it in.
Facebook’s start and rapid early growth was of a part with the ethos of what was then called Web 2.0: grow your user base as fast as you can, and the money will come later.
For Facebook and a slew of other companies, the tendency to offer a product or service for free meant that the obvious shift was to ads. Ads function on the attention of people, and when you suddenly have millions of people on your shiny new app, what better way to build a business than monetizing that very attention?
The monetization of attention is rife with problems, however. The “Washington Post” reports that Facebook tends to prioritize posts that receive more than a simple like, but instead get reactions of anger or love. That has the potential knockon effect of amplifying more sa- lacious, extreme and some- times misleading posts.
It is thus worth asking the ex- tent to which our current crisis of authority — the fact that there are now millions of people who, for example, believe in vaccine misinformation, or worse, serious conspiracy theories — is related to the tendency of an ad-based social media to elevate the most controversial, or indeed, controvertible content.
Consider: the “Post” also reports that Facebook withheld data that relayed just how much vaccine misinformation was being posted to the network. Pockets of anti-vax communities cemented their presence and influence on the network, while posts by the World Health Organization about the efficacy of vaccines were bombarded by conspiracy theorists.
Yet, in public-facing documents and even congressional testimony, Facebook stuck to the line that it was winning the war on misinformation.
There is, quite simply, a basic bind at the core of all our current online lives: The revenue earned by these massive com- panies runs on and through at- tention, and, as a result, the dif- ficult work of figuring out what a new kind of digital social relation looks like is forever mired in the need to put ads next to everything.
The obvious question then in light of the Facebook Papers is what is to be done. The most obvious first step is intervention by regulators, and there is a growing sense that simply breaking up Facebook will not work. Rather, the mechanisms by which we are served content in particular ways and in a certain order has to become both more transparent and subject to a set of new laws.
As to the basic ad-based model, however, the answer is less clear. After all, any attempt at paid social media that avoids ads has fallen flat.
Meanwhile, it is extremely unlikely that either governments or the public would tolerate or embrace some form of staterun social networking infrastructure.
That leaves us with little in the way of options — or hope.
Still. Some decades ago, a few scientists began suggesting that we would need to move away from fossil fuels. The world, these lone voices suggested, would be in serious peril if we did not. At the time, it seemed almost absurd. Not only were oil companies both economically and politically dominant, the entire global infrastructure was based on carbon-intensive energy.
While we can now hardly have claimed to have successfully fought climate change, we are on our way, and may yet avert disaster.
If we similarly step back and consider that our digital lives are built on an ultimately destructive business model, we may still have time to think — and indeed, build — another, better way.