Reach of Facebook — boon or menace?
Facebook’s global monopoly poses a deadly threat in developing nations, writes John Naughton.
THE most significant moment in the US Senate’s interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg came when Senator Lindsey Graham asked the Facebook boss: ‘‘Who’s your biggest competitor?’’
It was one of the few moments in his fivehour testimony when Zuckerberg seemed genuinely discombobulated. The video of the exchange is worth watching. First, he smirks. Then he waffles about Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft ‘‘overlapping’’ with Facebook in various ways. It doesn’t look as if he believes what he’s saying.
Eventually, Graham cuts to the chase and asks Zuckerberg if he thinks Facebook is a monopoly.
‘‘It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me,’’ the lad replies.
Laughter ripples through the room, as well it might. Here, at last, was something that every senator at the hearing understood. What’s less clear is whether they grasped the scale of the problem the company poses to society. For Facebook is a new kind of monopoly.
We’re accustomed to the idea of companies becoming dominant in some jurisdictions. But we have never before encountered a corporation that has a global monopoly. Because wherever you go on the planet these days, Facebook is the only socialnetworking game in town. It has no serious competitors — anywhere.
The implications of this are only now beginning to dawn on us. In the past two years, we have woken up to Facebook’s pernicious role in Western democratic politics and are beginning to think about ways of addressing that problem in our bailiwicks. To date, the ideas about regulation that have surfaced seem ineffectual and so the damage continues. But at least liberal democracies have some degree of immunity to the untruths disseminated by bad actors who exploit Facebook’s automated targeting systems — provided by a free press, parliamentary inquiries, independent judiciaries, publicservice broadcasters, universities, professional bodies and so on.
Other societies, particularly the developing countries now most assiduously targeted by Facebook, have few such institutions and it is there that the company has the capacity to wreak the most havoc. We’ve had intimations of this for a while, notably after it became clear that Facebook was a medium for antiMuslim hysteria in Myanmar, hysteria that was subsequently translated into fullblown ethnic cleansing. One of the key figures in all this was the ultranationalist Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, who used Facebook to broadcast his views about the Rohingya after he was banned from preaching by the Government.
Wirathu compared Muslims with mad dogs and posted gruesome pictures of dead bodies that he claimed were killed by Muslims — with predictable consequences. United Nations officials now say that social media has had a ‘‘determining role’’ in antiRohingya Muslim violence in Myanmar, which the UN itself has called ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’. For ‘‘social media’’, read Facebook, because there’s no competition to it in Myanmar.
But now we’re discovering that the platform is playing a similar role in other developing countries, thanks to a terrific piece of reporting by Amanda Taub and Max Fischer of the New York Times. In a way, the headline — ‘‘Where countries are tinderboxes and Facebook is a match’’ — says it all. The illustration over the online edition of their report is a video of a Buddhist mob setting fire to Muslimowned shops and homes in Digana, Sri Lanka.
Taub and Fischer’s reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s descent into the current cyclone of hatred and violence is based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger. It reveals, they say, ‘‘that Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumour to killing’’. Facebook officials, they say, ‘‘ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact’’. Facebook itself says in response that it tries to remove inflammatory content as soon as it can.
Which brings us back to the significance of Facebook being a global monopoly. Already, the company’s market in the West is reaching saturation, so most of its future growth has to come from increasing its penetration into the lessdeveloped parts of the world. That’s why it’s been pushing its ‘‘free basics’’ services, which give owners of cheap smartphones who cannot afford internet data limited free connectivity, so long as they use the Facebook app.
The result is that many of these new users are understandably convinced that Facebook is the internet. And so it becomes their sole source of online information. But it also makes them uniquely vulnerable to hoodlums such as the guys who started the rumour that kicked off some of the Sri Lankan violence — that Muslim pharmacies in Sri Lanka were stockpiling pills aimed at sterilising the Sinhalese community.
Fake news affects elections in the West, but in the rest of the world it costs lives. And Facebook is often a carrier of it.
One of the most impressive books I’ve ever read is Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an account of the Soviet era told as a combination of Russianstyle fiction and social science. And I’ve just found a terrific record of a seminar on the book put together by the political scientist Henry Farrell and some of his colleagues. It’s a worthy tribute to an extraordinary work.
As we slowly get to grips with the implications of the internet, inventor’s remorse is beginning to take hold. The best articulation of that sentiment I’ve seen thus far is The Internet Apologises . . . , a collection of interviews with some of the more prominent people — Jaron Lanier, Ellen Pao, Ethan Zuckerman etc — in the evolution of the technology. Read it and weep. Hindsight is the only exact science. Alas.