Check out Wired magazine’s deep dive into Facebook’s horrific 2018, “15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook.” Business journalists Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein detail Facebook’s attempts last year to corral its self-induced global dumpster fire fanned by prioritization of growth over all other values–particularly user privacy–according to its founder’s mantra: “move fast and break things” (including democracy it would seem). As in previous years, Facebook repeatedly offered familiar, dubious apologies for its most egregious missteps, scandals and user data breaches–when caught–while news feed algorithms continued to promote its prioritized categories of “politics, crime, or tragedy”, driving unwitting user engagement in amplified outrage cycles.
It’s not all bad news, as the article covers some of Facebook’s attempts to atone for its sins. Facebook finally began combating fake news with serious, large scale resources, appropriate when foreign genocides were fueled by malevolent government propaganda on Facebook. The company created “election war rooms” to fight Russian intervention via Facebook in the US mid-terms and other countries’ elections. Zuckerberg even recently announced a new focus on privacy and end-to-end encryption of messages. Unfortunately, that was shortly before a shooter in New Zealand live-streamed video of his murderous attack on a mosque on Facebook–such terrorists could benefit if Facebook loosens control over video streams and mass postings.
Several summary excerpts from the Wired article:
- Facebook continues to pay for its original sin of ignoring privacy and fixating on growth.
- Sometimes Facebook makes the world more open and connected; sometimes it makes it more closed and disaffected. Despots and demagogues have proven to be just as adept at using Facebook as democrats and dreamers.
- The idea of Facebook is to bring people together, but the business model only works by slicing and dicing users into small groups for the sake of ad targeting.
- For years, smart critics have bemoaned the perverse incentives created by Facebook’s annual bonus program, which pays people in large part based on the company hitting growth targets…Everyone is now given bonuses based on how well the company achieves its goals on a metric of social good.
- Another deep critique is that Facebook simply sped up the flow of information to a point where society couldn’t handle it. Now the company has started to slow it down. The company’s fake-news fighters focus on information that’s going viral. WhatsApp has been reengineered to limit the number of people with whom any message can be shared.
I left Facebook last year, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal was exposed, before the largest data breach in Facebook history and the narrowed news feed focus on “politics, crime, or tragedy”. While many savvy users also left Facebook last year, the overall Facebook user base continued to grow, albeit more slowly than before. As Facebook wrestles with its fundamental problems of “toxic virality” and disregard for user privacy, it faces a future existential problem in the US: Facebook is for the old (or blissfully unaware), not the young. Most kids are not joining Facebook, sharing instead on YouTube, Instagram (owned by Facebook), Snapchat and text messages. Few Facebook employees proudly tout their company these days. If remaining Facebook users and employees can no longer claim ignorance, they must retreat to faith that Facebook will change, apathy, delusion, or worse.
Moonday 