Facebook changes raise new what-ifs
Facebook is free. But what if it weren’t? A couple of events this month presented twin possibilities for shifts in how we use the Internet: First, the company now known as Meta announced that, starting in January, it would remove thousands of “sensitive” ad-targeting categories related to race, religion, sexual orientation, party affiliation and more. Second, Twitter said it would give paying users access to ad-free news articles from several publications, including The Post, through a subscription service called Twitter Blue. Taken together, the developments offer an opportunity to reflect on the social media status quo — and the trade-offs that might come with a change.
“Senator, we run ads,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg famously said of Facebook in an early congressional hearing when he was asked how his firm managed to make a profit. Critics have pointed out that the users of Facebook themselves are the product — their data and attention, sucked up and spit back out in the form of personalized recommendations for fashionable-yet-sensible work shoes or city council candidates. Meta’s planned restrictions on the criteria advertisers can select to reach users on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger don’t do much to alter this: They make it more difficult for businesses to home in on people based on their interactions with particular types of content (and crucially, to discriminate against or manipulate them), but a savvy customer can achieve the same effect with the tools that remain.
Even this minor difficulty, however, has a downside: Nonprofits, advocacy groups and campaigns are concerned that they will struggle to build fundraising lists or reach supporters. So are small businesses. The bigger guys, generally, don’t rely as much on the help — because their bases already exist.
Meanwhile, Twitter Blue will allow a subset of users special perks, most related to news consumption, for a fee. Twitter Blue itself won’t be entirely ad-free, but there’s no reason that in the future it couldn’t be, given its alternate source of revenue. Charging for a product dramatically alters the incentives for the company and the consumer alike.
Twitter Blue will be trying to give users what they want so that they keep paying, instead of only giving advertisers (or shareholders) what they want — more data and attention, most easily achieved with algorithms that privilege the sensational. And users of a pay-for service will be motivated to make the most of their time on it rather than waste it.
There are drawbacks here, too. Say a future Twitter Blue, or a Facebook Plus, did eliminate ads. Would that mean privacy only for those who can afford it? Say social media sites all switched to a subscription model. Would the rich alone be able to benefit from connecting with the rest of the world? Say these new sites focused their attention on narrower audiences with narrower interests. Would society become only more siloed? It’s easy to want anything other than the Internet we have today — and essential to imagine how that Internet could, or should, be different. But this requires recognizing what is good and bad both of what already exists and what could replace it.