Facebook gets another ‘klap’ US agency says the company’s ‘reckless’ behaviour is a danger to teenagers

ow do you define child labour? Is it putting young children to work when they should instead be experiencing childhood? Does it involve earning an income from the “work” of children without compensating them? Is it any different if the “work” consists of being a teenager on social media and that information is being monetised by someone else?

Last week Facebook got another legal klap from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The US agency has already fined the tech firm $5bn for breaking a 2012 consent decree about how its data was used.

The FTC is revisiting this privacy process, after Facebook settled in 2022, warning that it wants to impose a “blanket prohibition” (its own words) on the social giant’s monetising of children’s data.

“The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk,” says FTC bureau of consumer protection director Samuel Levine. “Facebook needs to answer for its failures.” Who doesn’t agree with that?

So what’s going on here?

People “pay” for social media through a complicated exchange of giving up lots of personal data to enable these platforms to provide a service that would otherwise cost a lot of money.

That is the argument made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s the same argument Facebook makes for small businesses that its free offerings enable them to compete with bigger companies.

Really, did it cost Facebook $116bn to provide this last year? That is the revenue for 2022 that Facebook reported. It can’t be possible that hosting and delivering Facebook and its other apps (WhatsApp, Instagram and

HMessenger) costs over a hundred billion dollars. That’s quite a hosting bill. We don’t know Facebook’s exact cost structure for all the servers it operates and the engineers needed to keep the money-making machine going. But it’s certainly not the full figure. A disproportionately large amount of personal data is being given up for a service that is, frankly, pretty poor.

Remember that Facebook is a for-profit company. It’s not an educational NGO with a do-good purpose. The UN even accused Facebook of helping with the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Let’s also not forget how whistle-blower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook “prioritises growth over safety” when it comes to teenage girls’ mental health. Facebook’s attitude towards misinformation led US President Joe Biden to condemn the way Covid antivaxxers were given free rein by the social giant. “They’re killing people,” Biden complained in August 2021, long after the pandemic embarrassingly revealed that social platforms have always been able to prevent disinformation.

Facebook’s response is to call the FTC’s latest move “a political stunt”. Of course it would.

Such excessive extraction of voluminous amounts of personal information under the guise of connecting people is the essence of surveillance capitalism. That’s the basis that allowed Cambridge Analytica to, first, illegally harvest 87-million Facebook users’ data, and, second, use it to manipulate the outcome of the Brexit and US presidential elections in 2016.

Facebook should face a “blanket prohibition” on profiting from the personal lives of teenagers.

Why has it taken so long to get here? Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa