Tech played by a different set of rules — Facebook’s crisis should put an end to that
Facebook was 2 years old when it introduced its most transformative feature: a news feed that offered users a running list of updates about their friends’ love lives, favorite new bands and latest vacation photos.
For the hundreds of thousands of people on the social network, the idea of broadcasting personal details without consent came as a shock. There was backlash on the platform and demands that Facebook provide a way to opt out.
Facebook held fast and kept its news feed, which remains the platform’s nerve center. Its then 21-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a blog post titled “Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You,” in which he wrote “stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is.”
The future billionaire had made a gamble about the boundaries of privacy and won. It proved how much easier it was to release something new and deal with the consequences later — an ethos enshrined in the company’s original mantra, “Move fast and break things.”
It was a strategy that worked for years to come. Facebook pushed its users to share more personal information, providing the lifeblood for the company’s dramatic growth and riches. There was occasional pushback, such as lawsuits against Facebook for tracking users on other sites and spoiling one man’s engagement surprise by revealing to his fiance he had bought a ring. But even a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 couldn’t stop the company from encroaching further into people’s private lives.
Then last week, Facebook discovered that the world it was irrevocably changing may have changed its mind about the social network — and possibly the tech industry at large, too.
For the first time, public officials, lawmakers and even late-night talk show hosts applied sustained pressure on Facebook to explain how data about millions of unsuspecting users allegedly wound up in the hands of a political consulting firm with ties to the Trump campaign.
The crisis compelled Zuckerberg to emerge from five days of silence to embark on an unprecedented media blitz Wednesday to apologize and promise changes. On Thursday, Zuckerberg was asked by the leaders of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee to testify.
The controversy has forced Facebook to demonstrate it can be trusted with its users’ most personal details at a particularly sensitive time. The European Union is introducing strict new privacy laws that could threaten Facebook’s business model. And Americans are still coming to grips with how the platform was weaponized to sow discord during the 2016 presidential election.
The social media giant, which has thus far averted any major regulation, is now the subject of investigations by the FTC and the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts. Senators are calling for hearings, setting up the possibility that Facebook and the tech industry could face tough new laws — especially if the midterm elections result in the Republicans losing their majorities in Congress.
That any of this is happening is remarkable for an industry whose culture was widely celebrated in many corners for its cavalier attitude toward rules and traditions. Regulating start-ups has long been considered tantamount to stifling innovation. Brash tech executives could sidestep ethics as long as they kept building apps and gadgets that delivered convenience, entertainment and returns for investors.
But Silicon Valley’s social capital appears to be waning. After more than a year of headlines about Russian interference, stolen data and sexual harassment, the tech industry appears headed closer to a reckoning. No longer are the stakes confined to banalities on your news feed. At risk is access to the truth and the ability for a society to rise above the rancor.
“If we wanted to mark an inflection point, it was this week,” said Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC and author of “Move Fast and break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
“This is an ‘aha’ moment for a lot of people, most importantly, for a lot of regulators and legislators,” Taplin continued. “There’s a growing understanding that these companies, in some sense, are not doing anything that has an ethical core.”
Few, if any, industries have risen quicker and influenced lives more dramatically than tech. The cliche that internet companies are in the business of changing the world is demonstratively true. But the implication that they’re doing so for the better is now the subject of rigorous debate.
When lawmakers passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 to address piracy on the fledgling internet, they had no way of knowing they had laid the foundation for the spread of misinformation and propaganda nearly two decades later.