Facebook’s unhappy 15th
The social media giant is an obnoxious teenager that is oblivious to its self-centred destructiveness
Turning 15 is a drag — ask any teenager. Imagine then that you’re Facebook. Last week, as the largest social media network reached this milestone, it seemed every bit the gangly kid trying to look cool while beset by angst and self-doubt. All while being hated by the rest of the class.
Just a few years ago, Facebook was self-confident. It grew from its early years of “move fast and break things” into an established global figure, the internet’s intranet, as it were.
Then the 2016 US presidential elections happened, like an outbreak of acne that turned into a life-threatening disease, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal turned into a full-blown crisis of confidence in 2018.
Mark Zuckerberg’s post (on Facebook, obviously) to commemorate this anniversary is as tone-deaf as all of his other self-congratulatory postings. “As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society … there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasise the negative, and … to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy,” he wrote.
“To the contrary, while any rapid social change creates uncertainty, I believe what we’re seeing is people having more power, and a long-term trend reshaping society to be more open and accountable over time.”
That “accountable” comes from the person who oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s theft of the data of millions of users and the hack that revealed 30million users’ login details. Zuckerberg has said he is responsible for all the scandals but he’s managed to avoid any accountability. He has structured Facebook’s shareholding so that he can’t be fired by his shareholders.
The New York Times ran a spoof anniversary video of the cheesy variety Facebook creates for its users. Titled “A friendship no-one asked for”, the video jokes: “You brought 2.27-billion people together … so what if more than 116-million of them aren’t real?” — a reference to the innumerable times the service has been misused by Russian and other internet trolls to spread fake news, misogyny and other hate speech. In Myanmar (Burma), Facebook has been implicated in helping to spread hate speech against the Rohingya and is accused of human rights abuses.
The brilliant fact-checking website Snopes is cancelling its relationship and says it is evaluating whether working with Facebook was a “net positive”. Clearly it wasn’t despite the $100,000 it was paid in 2017.
Facebook says its costs rose $10bn last year as it hired more people to moderate hateful content, but interviews with these employees, many of whom complain of burnout, reveal the vain efforts to root out “bad actors”. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, who like me is Jewish, has defended Holocaust denialists.
At 15, Facebook has lost its innocence. It’s time to grow up.
Zuckerberg has said he is responsible for all the scandals but has avoided any accountability