Social media ‘a menace to society’

Bosworth went on: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”

Last week, Bosworth said the memo was designed to provoke debate, and he disagreed with it. Zuckerberg, too, said he dis- agreed with the sentiment.

Even more scary are the comments by Facebook employees, which lay bare the toxic internal culture and its ominous overtones of a paranoid cult. One staffer wrote: “Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a one-off bad decision,” and “Imagine that some percentage of leakers are spies for governments.”

Another Facebook employee wrote: “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some God complex that jeopardises our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?”

As for deleting your Facebook profile, Goldstuck thinks it’s too late already.

“Why do you want to delete Facebook? You knew all along that anything you put on social media was on a public stage,” he says. “Your credit cards give away far more information. Cut them up first.”

It may seem improbable, but Facebook’s biggest threat might come simply from a lack of interest. Researchers emarketer found in February that “Facebook is losing younger users at an even faster pace than previously expected”. For the first time, this year fewer than half of US Internet users aged between 12 and 17 will use Facebook at least once a month. Users aged 12-24 will decline, as will users 11 and younger.

It’s worth remembering that Facebook, the current top dog, was the second-largest social network only a decade ago. The leader back then? Myspace.

“Will Myspace ever lose its monopoly?” The Guardian asked in 2007. “In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on Myspace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are.” How quaint that sounds now. Facebook be warned. Before the Cambridge Analytica news broke, a string of high-profile tech figures, including several former Facebook executives, warned about the toxicity of social media and its consequences for society.

Facebook creates “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” said the man who created the social network’s famous “like” button, Justin Rosenstein. “Everyone is distracted. All of the time,” he said.

Former vice-president for growth Chamath Palihapitiya warned: “The shortterm, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no co-operation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem – this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

He added: “We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Sir Tim Berners-lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, marked his invention’s 29th anniversary a week before with a warning about how the dominant online players have been able “to weaponise the Web at scale”.

Even as we pass the threshold of more than half of the people on earth going online this year, he wrote: “We’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data”.

Not only has “this concentration of power created a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared” but “dominant platforms” maintain their strength “by creating barriers for competitors” by buying start-up challengers and new innovations, while hiring the best talent in the industry.

Crucially, in light of Cambridge Analytica, he continued, “add to this the competitive advantage that their user data gives them and we can expect the next 20 years to be far less innovative than the last.”

Famed investor George Soros has also been particularly outspoken. “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” Soros said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. “This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

Calling Facebook and Google a “menace” to society and “obstacles to innovation” he warned that social media “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes [and] deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide [which] can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, though childless himself, said he wouldn’t allow his nephew to use social media. “There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network,” he said in January.

All of this was before the true extent of how deep Facebook’s data-mining of its users emerged through the Cambridge Analytica revelations. The US Federal Trade Commission says it is investigating if Facebook complied with its 2011 agreement over privacy settings.

As we like to say in SA, social media has been “captured”.