Is Facebook the problem with Facebook, or is it us?
The only thing worse than being on Facebook is not being on Facebook. That’s the one clear conclusion we can draw from the recent controversies surrounding the world’s favorite social network.
Despite the privacy violations, despite the spewing of lies and insults, despite the blistering criticism from politicians and the press, Facebook continues to suck up an inordinate amount of humanity’s time and attention.
In “Antisocial Media,” University of Virginia professor Siva Vaidhyanathan gives a full and rigorous accounting of Facebook’s sins. Much of the criticism will be familiar to anyone who has been following the news about the company. What distinguishes the book is Vaidhyanathan’s skill in putting the social media phenomenon into a broader context — legal, historical and political.
He explains, for instance, why our discussions of data privacy have been so arid. Because the American view of privacy has been shaped by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures,” we tend to see privacy in narrowly legalistic terms: What we do in secret is protected from prying eyes; what we do in public is open to examination. Now that the personal information people once kept in closets and file cabinets circulates through vast corporate clouds, the old legal distinction has been erased. Everything is subject to inspection.
Lost in the legalistic view is any sense of the ethical consequences of going through life under constant surveillance. We don’t consider that being watched, parsed and classified may be antithetical to human dignity. Our blindness to privacy’s moral dimension suits Facebook and other social networks.
Vaidhyanathan’s criticism is sharp but even-handed. He debunks some of the more extreme claims about the influence of social media on public opinion. He finds little evidence to support the popular idea that online voter-manipulation schemes run by outside agents had a decisive influence on the outcome of the Brexit vote in Britain or the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
But Facebook and its ilk are nonetheless debasing politics, he argues. The messages that grab the most attention on social media are tightly targeted, highly charged appeals to emotion,
not reasoned arguments.
The problem is compounded by Facebook’s practice of dedicating staff members to political campaigns to ensure that candidates use its data and ads in the most effective ways possible. Vaidhyanathan argues that Facebook’s “embedded” consultants played a particularly central role in crafting Donald Trump’s online advertising during the 2016 presidential race. They steered the campaign toward the kind of inflammatory, visually striking messages
that stir passions and get widely shared throughout the network. Facebook profited by selling more ads, and Trump profited by attracting more votes, more volunteers and more contributions. Through this “confluence of interests,” Vaidhyanathan posits, Trump gained a considerable advantage.
“Antisocial Media” is not a hopeful book. Vaidhyanathan doesn’t think Facebook can be reformed from within. “The problem with Facebook is Facebook,” he writes. It’s not just that the company makes its money by pimping its members to advertisers. It’s that the network is now so immense that it has become impossible to weed out the scoundrels and creeps until after they’ve done their damage. “Facebook,” Vaidhyanathan concludes, “is too big to tame.” The company will always be cleaning up messes, begging our forgiveness.
If “Antisocial Media” is scholarly in tone, Jaron Lanier’s “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” is cheeky. Lanier, a computer scientist who has become one of Silicon Valley’s best-known apostates, aims to convince us that Facebook, Twitter and other such platforms are so deeply corrupt, their effects so personally and socially destructive, that we need to ditch them, and fast.
Lanier sees social media as a manipulative system that demeans everyone it ensnares. The more information about ourselves we feed into it, the better it gets at steering our thoughts and opinions. The essential business of a company like Facebook, he argues, is behavior modification. Not only does it harvest incredibly detailed data about individuals’ habits and preferences, but it also runs myriad experiments aimed at determining which messages and other stimuli are most likely to grab attention, elicit strong reactions and trigger compulsive consumption of information. Needless to say, these kinds of sophisticated techniques for psychological engineering are extremely valuable to advertisers that want to sell us goods. They’re equally valuable to political operatives, legitimate or otherwise, who want to shape our views.
Because the techniques are hidden from us — the companies treat their algorithms as trade secrets — we’re rarely conscious of the ways we’re being manipulated. As the software exerts ever more influence over what we see and how we think, we begin to lose our free will and even our sense of individuality. Unable to think for ourselves, we drift toward tribalism.
The most revealing moment in “Antisocial Media” comes when Vaidhyanathan describes his own online habits. Despite his comprehensive understanding of Facebook’s ill effects, he has been a loyal and largely happy member of the network for more than a decade. So the problem with Facebook is not just Facebook. It is also us.