TEICH REVS THE SHARKS /28

Mark Zuckerberg must address Facebook’s biggest problem – its enormous scale, paired with a business model that requires the company to monetise its users’ private data to the greatest extent possible, says the writer.

last year’s Alabama special election) and Facebook’s broader responsibility as a global power.

But Zuckerberg’s responses raised more questions. Here is how he answered a question about Facebook’s business model, which is based on selling advertisers and developers the ability to target Facebook users based on their personal data.

Roose: “The basic economic model of Facebook, in which users provide data that Facebook uses to help advertisers and developers to better target potential customers and users – do you feel like that works, given what we now know about the risks?”

Zuckerberg: “The thing about the ad model that is really important

that aligns with our mission is that our mission is to build a community for everyone in the world and to bring the world closer together.

“And a really important part of that is making a service people can afford. A lot of the people, once you get past the first billion people, can’t afford to pay a lot. Therefore, having it be free and have a business model that is ad supported ends up being really important and aligned.

“Now, over time, might there be ways for people who can afford it to pay a different way? That’s certainly something we’ve thought about over time. But I don’t think the ad model is going to go away, because I think fundamentally, it’s important to have a service like this that everyone in the world can use and the

only way to do that is to have it be very cheap or free.”

Narrowly, it may be true that being free and ad supported helps Facebook achieve its goals of connecting billions of people to its services. Facebook has developed a number of ways to make itself cheaper and easier to access – including, in some countries, effectively subsidising use through its Free Basics program, which allows people to use Facebook without its counting towards their data plans. But it’s not clear this approach has served society well. Especially in countries like Myanmar, where Facebook was recently blamed by UN investigators for fuelling ethnic violence against the Rohingya, it’s possible that having a slightly higher barrier to entry would be a net good, even if it cost Facebook some users in the short term. (And it’s not even clear that it would. People already pay for their cellphones and data plans all over the world and might be willing to part with a small fee to keep using their favourite social network.)

Switching to a subscription model wouldn’t fix all of Facebook’s problems overnight. There would still be foreign actors trying to interfere in elections, false news and divisive content intending to sway public opinion. But moving from an ad-supported model would make the network harder to exploit. (Bot networks are less effective on subscription platforms.) And it would lessen the company’s incentive to sell out its users’ privacy to advertisers.

Facebook has already shown a willingness to try new models. Whatsapp makes money by charging businesses for an enterprise product that lets them message their customers. And this week Facebook said it was experimenting with a subscription model that would allow popular creators to charge $5 (R58) a month for access to their posts.

What if all of Facebook cost $5 a month and certain types of divisive and exploitable ad categories and behaviours were removed from the network entirely? Would users revolt en masse, and colonise some other free social media app? Would Facebook collapse?

Maybe. But being smaller might not be a bad thing. If we’ve learned anything from this year’s troubles, it’s this: Facebook’s platform problems multiply as it gets bigger and more complex, but its ability to deal with those problems stays fairly constant. Zuckerberg might be dedicated to fixing Facebook’s problems, but unless he addresses its biggest problem – its enormous scale, paired with a business model that requires the company to monetise its users’ private data to the greatest extent possible – there’s only so much he can do.

The New York Times Syndicate