Facebook: No easy fixes—and still nowhere else to go
After a catastrophic year, Facebook barely squeaks by with a “D” on almost every measure, said Casey Newton in TheVerge .com. “Whether you’re evaluating the company by its financial performance, its public perception, or its ability to contain and avoid scandals, the company will end the year in worse shape than it began.” At the beginning of the year, Facebook was already racked by charges that it had allowed the proliferation of hate speech, fake news, and Russian trolls. CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised the company would do better. But the scandals just kept on coming in 2018. News about massive privacy breaches and the cover-ups that followed continued to roll out through December. Thanks to the steady beat of revelations, Facebook has “grown into the market leader in the field of apologizing for privacy violations,” said Matt Levine in Bloomberg.com.
For all those apologies, Facebook’s problems are nowhere near solved, said Max Fisher in The New York Times. When it comes to hate speech, for example, a recent investigation revealed that the company has a global network of 15,000 moderators—who use a slew of guidelines hashed out by lawyers and engineers— to curtail dangerous content on its site. But there are “numerous gaps, biases, and outright errors.” Worse still, “as Facebook employees grope for the right answers, they have allowed extremist language to flourish in some countries while censoring mainstream speech in others.” This leaves Facebook deeply broken, with no fix in sight, said Erin Dunne in the Washington Examiner. Moderating everything that goes up on Facebook is more than the company is prepared to do. Repairing its systems “is likely be so costly as to overburden the company, which had never planned on playing the role of global speech police in the first place.”
Despite calls for Zuckerberg to be fired, or for users to delete the app, “face it, most everyone we know is on Facebook,” said Jefferson Graham in USA Today. There just aren’t any real social media alternatives that compare. There’s Instagram, but that’s owned by Facebook, too. But even if people still use the site, Facebook has lost whatever “trustworthiness it had left,” said Hanna Kozlowska in Qz.com. It’s time for regulators to step in and make it easier for users to download their personal data and “move all their information to new, better platforms, potential Facebook competitors”— the circa 2018 equivalent of requiring phone companies to let you switch your carrier and keep your number. Right now, with 2 billion users, Facebook is too big to fail. Until there’s a way of moving to competing networks, “we’ll all be resigned to accepting Facebook as a necessary evil.”