FACEBOOK AND ITS FRIENDS
Under growing pressure from regulators and lawmakers, the social media giant is using its might – and money – to help preserve its image. But should our policymakers and politicians be cosying up to a company that many see as being part of the problem?
LAST MONTH, almost three weeks ago, one of the most powerful businesswomen in the world added a picture album to her Facebook profile. The collection of photographs, titled A Day In Dublin, was accompanied by a series of captions detailing her whirlwind trip to the Emerald Isle.
‘Keeping children safe is one of the hardest and most important jobs in the world – and it’s an issue we care about deeply at Facebook,’ wrote the profile owner Sheryl Sandberg, who is also Facebook’s chief operating officer.
Next to the post, one of several that were gushing about her trip to Dublin last month, was a picture taken at DCU’s St Patrick’s campus with Ms Sandberg sandwiched between Professor Brian MacCraith, who is DCU president, and Professor James O’Higgins Norman, the director of the National Anti-Bullying Centre at the university.
Earlier that morning Ms Sandberg had announced that Facebook Ireland would be investing €1million in online safety programmes run by ABC and SpunOut. That day, as more than 100 teachers attended the first anti-bullying training session as part of this programme, she even gave them a speech on how seriously Facebook takes the issue of safety.
On the face of it this all sounded like an incredibly altruistic gesture from a company that is deeply concerned about the welfare of children online, but to many, measured against Facebook’s actual behaviour in recent years, it actually sounded somewhere between rather hollow and downright hypocritical.
After all, what has been revealed in recent times about Facebook’s own attitude to sickening online content that would appal most normal people – but which helps the company make money – suggests a very different set of beliefs at play.
It was only in July last year, for example, that a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation uncovered horrifying instances of Facebook moderators justifying a staggering refusal to remove vile and sickening content from its pages. The exposé showed how Facebook moderators found ways to justify publishing videos of a child being battered senseless by adults or of vicious fighting between two schoolchildren with one beaten to the ground and kicked. Keeping children safe indeed! (And that’s before you get into the hate speech or the video of a man eating live baby rats for fun.)
THEN, of course, there is also Facebook’s long-standing refusal to do anything to verify the age of its users, thereby allowing millions of underage children around the world to access the site.
Numerous studies worldwide have shown children are able to flout the age limits with impunity: in 2017 Britain’s NSPCC warned: ‘Social networks are clearly turning a blind eye when it comes to children under 13 signing up for their services. For too long sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have failed to protect children on their platforms.’
Certainly, this flat refusal to act to keep children off its platforms also seems distinctly at odds with Ms Sandberg’s heartfelt declarations about child safety. And last week, Instagram – owned wholly by Facebook – was publicly accused of being partly to blame for the death of British teenager Molly Russell.
Her devastated father Ian said Molly’s family had found disturbing material relating to depression and suicide when they looked at her account.
And then, of course, there was the now-infamous Boswell memo: a document written by the company’s vice-president Andrew Boswell in 2016. This astonishing document revealed his view that, for Facebook, growth at any costs was ‘de facto good’ – even if that meant someone died because they were exposed to bullying on the site.
All of which might perhaps lead you to wonder whether an anti-bullying centre such as the one at DCU should really be getting into bed with Facebook, rather than campaigning to make the company act more responsibly.
Not according to the recipients of the money, of course. ‘We would not be here today with Facebook, or anyone else, if there was any sense of interference in what we are about,’ said Professor James O’Higgins Norman, director of the National AntiBullying Centre.
Prof. O’Higgins Norman said the training programme was based on ongoing research, ‘and regardless of who funds our research, the integrity of the research process and what comes out of that is of most importance to us’.
Which all sounds very reassuring, until you realise that Prof. O’Higgins Norman is not exactly a paragon when it comes to treating others with respect. Earlier this year, the Irish Daily Mail revealed how the selfsame anti-bullying expert had been forced to issue a grovelling apology after attempting to smear a rival academic to TDs.
The extraordinary episode occurred during last year’s Oireachtas debate on the Digital Age of Consent. Prof. O’Higgins Norman was adamant that the age limit should be reduced from 16 to just 13, the lowest permissible level under EU law (and, as it happens, the age that Facebook also wanted). However, TDs had been hugely impressed by the arguments of renowned cyber-psychologist Dr Mary Aiken, who said the minimum age should be kept at 16. (Her effect was hardly surprising: not only has Dr Aiken advised
congressional committees and written seminal works on the psychology of the internet, she even had a major US television show, CSI: Cyber, based on her work.)
Yet because Dr Aiken had dared to take a different view, Prof. O’Higgins Norman set about trying to undermine her credentials. In an email to Independent TD Mattie McGrath, sent from his DCU email account, Prof. O’Higgins Norman suggested that Dr Aiken had not conducted any original research in the field and went on to question her academic bona fides, calling her a ‘self-proclaimed’ criminologist.
Finally, he added a sneering analogy to boot: ‘Asking a criminologist for advice is like asking a prison guard in Mountjoy how to run society.’
When Dr Aiken became aware of these slurs, she demanded an immediate, unconditional apology – and got it.
All of which would appear to raise questions about the association between an academic who would slur a colleague by email, and the social media giant which stands accused of facilitating all kinds of egregious behaviour online.
That said, from Facebook’s public image point of view, the association is a very advantageous one. For just €1million (just 0.0055% of its Irish revenues of €18.1billion) it allows the company to be widely reported as taking a stand against bullying – despite what Boswell’s damning memo might seem to suggest it actually believes.
AND this isn’t the only act of do-gooding which Facebook has engaged in. It is also, for example, listed as a pro-bono supporter of an organisation called CyberSafe Ireland. Many people appear to believe that CyberSafe is an official statutory body created to look after online safety for children. Its leading lights often appear in the media giving their opinions on the best way to approach that subject. In reality, though, it’s simply a standalone charity, created in 2015 by longtime NGO worker Alex Cooney, who also acts as its CEO.
What is particularly notable about CyberSafe’s approach to online safety, though, is its opposition to legal controls on how and where children access the internet, or the age at which they should be allowed to have smartphones. Instead, they preach the message that the way to keep children safe online is not to set legal limits, but to use education to ‘empower’ children to learn to navigate the internet safely. (Like Facebook, CyberSafe also strongly argued for reducing Ireland’s Digital Age of Consent from 16 to 13 last year.)
That’s all very well-meaning, but as many critics point out, it could also be seen as hopelessly naïve. Psychologists, in particular, argue that young children are simply not developed enough to be able to make the complex decisions that face them online. As Dr Aiken has said, ‘there is no shallow end to the internet’. Or as David Coleman, the country’s top parenting guru, has stated, giving your child a smartphone is like bringing them to London, dropping them off and saying, ‘Good luck getting home’.
Of course that’s quite aside from the mountain of evidence showing that nine-year-olds who have smartphones will do worse at school than their peers who don’t, or that smartphone ownership among children is associated with a greater risk of being cyber-bullied, groomed by paedophiles, exposed to hardcore pornography, being obese and feeling anxious, depressed and suicidal. (Last month, a Dublin court heard how a 16-year-old boy had sexually abused his eight-year-old half-sister after watching pornography on his smartphone. He was 14 at the time and said he was copying material he had viewed.)
Moreover, three separate national opinion polls have found that most Irish people would like a minimum age for smartphone ownership. Parents themselves know that young children simply do not have the cognitive functions, never mind the life skills, to navigate the internet safely – no matter how well they’ve been educated. And yet when organisations such as CyberSafe Ireland argue for the opposite, it makes it far harder for policymakers to take a stand.
LITTLE wonder, then, that Facebook is happy to support it: after all, its continuing profits depend on children being online more, not less. And CyberSafe Ireland is happy to take Facebook’s offer of free advertising space on its platform: as the organisation says itself, ‘This helps us to reach a much wider audience of parents and teachers’ with its particular message. Nor do the connections end there. Ms Cooney has, in the past, featured in Facebook’s ‘She Means Business’ series, an event hosted in the social media giant’s Dublin HQ to celebrate female entrepreneurs. Special adviser to the CyberSafe board is Mona O’Moore, the founding director of the National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre at DCU (the same one being funded by Facebook). Again, one might wonder whether accepting freebies from Facebook might amount to a potential conflict of interest for an organisation aimed at keeping children safe online – though, perhaps unsurprisingly, CyberSafe insists this is not the case at all.
When contacted this week, a spokesman said: ‘We are completely transparent about any probono support that we receive.
‘To infer that this kind of support compromises our integrity or our willingness to challenge these platforms is manifestly unfair. We regularly criticise the tech platforms for not doing enough to address the issue of child safety online, including calling for stronger regulation of industry.’
Either way, it certainly helps to convey a public message that Facebook cares.
Still, all the positive PR in the world is of little value unless you have the political connections to influence policy decisions too. (Which might explain why it recently added former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to its payroll.) Facebook’s lobbying lead in Ireland is Niamh Sweeney – a former special adviser to the last government’s Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Eamon Gilmore – and a woman with an almost unparalleled network of contacts in government and the civil service.
Official records show that Ms
Sweeney has lobbied politicians on GDPR, taxation, surveillance law and data privacy. In all, records show that Facebook Ireland has formally lobbied politicians on various issues 24 times since 2016.
On top of that, Facebook has also been given its own seat on the Government’s official online safety watchdog, the National Advisory Council for Online Safety – along with Google, Vodafone, the Internet Services Providers Association and Technology Ireland… plus the aforementioned Prof. O’Higgins Norman of the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre – and, of course, CyberSafe Ireland!
And if these powerful connections were not enough, the company is not afraid of going straight to the top either.
Ms Sandberg herself has had several meetings with taoisigh, past and present. After one with Enda Kenny in 2014, she wrote to the then Taoiseach, gently reminding him of the connection between ‘reasonable’ policies and ‘future investment’.
If anything, Leo Varadkar is seen by many as being even closer to the firm: he has met both Ms Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg and has what could be described as a cosy relationship with both.
Ms Sweeney has also lobbied the Taoiseach via his advisers and in person. Mr Varadkar met Mr Zuckerberg during a visit to the company’s Silicon Valley campus in 2017. After the visit, Mr Zuckerberg contacted him directly thanking him.
The Facebook CEO expressed his excitement about the opening of a data centre in Clonee, Co. Meath, and a research office in Cork by the Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus.
Mr Zuckerberg also referenced Mr Varadkar’s use of Facebook’s Dublin offices during his time as Social Protection Minister.
Mr Varadkar used the Facebook offices on Mother’s Day 2017 to call on employers to provide better maternity packages.
And the Taoiseach pledged to support Facebook’s growth in Ireland.
He said: ‘Ireland is, and will remain, a leading global location for innovative companies like Facebook.
‘We very much value the continued investment and contribution Facebook has made in Ireland and we look forward to continuing our relationship long into the future.’
Mr Varadkar has also met Sheryl Sandberg twice, at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in 2018.
Afterwards, she emailed Mr Varadkar to wish him ‘safe travels home.’
Mr Varadkar’s response, which came four days later via an adviser, suggested that the pair should stay in touch.
The company has also brought Irish Government ministers to its offices in the Dublin docklands for tips and training on using the platform.
Amid growing calls here and around Europe for far tougher regulation of social media, it’s hardly surprising that this giant profit-making machine would do whatever it can to influence opinion-formers and decisionmakers. That is, of course, the right of any business.
But the bigger question is this: when it comes to making children safe, should our opinionformers and decision-makers be choosing their own friends a little more wisely?