Facebook has become a colossus in social media all over the globe, along with the companies it purchased like Instagram and WhatsApp. It has become so big, its power and influence so widespread, that it is seen a threat to the well-being of societies. The various abuses that it has been associated with, such as enabling the fomenting of hate and divisiveness in societies that have led to genocidal actions, have been well-documented. After each such revelation, Facebook executives come before various bodies and go through the same ritual. They claim that they just provide a communication platform for people to express their views and that it is not their fault if other people abuse their platform. They then promise to try and implement safeguards that will minimize the risks of damage. But nothing they claim they are doing seems to work and the cycle gets repeated.
The recent testimony by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower within the company who released a cache of internal documents reveals how hollow are the protestations of Mark Zuckerberg and senior executives of the company that their good intentions are being thwarted by evil actors. She says that the company thrives on the mess it creates.
Haugen appeared in Washington on Tuesday after coming forward as the source of a series of revelations in the Wall Street Journal last month based on internal Facebook documents. They revealed the company knew Instagram was damaging teenagers’ mental health and that changes to Facebook’s News Feed feature – a central plank of users’ interaction with the service – had made the platform more polarising and divisive.
She told senators on Tuesday that Facebook knew Instagram users were being led to anorexia-related content. She said an algorithm “led children from very innocuous topics like healthy recipes … all the way to anorexia-promoting content over a very short period of time”.
In her opening testimony, Haugen, 37, said: “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy. The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” She added that Facebook was “buying its profits with our safety”. In 2020, Facebook reported a net income – a US measure of profit – of more than $29bn (£21bn).
One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Price, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, also launched a stinging attack on the company, saying that it is a threat to democracy, that it was “biased against facts”, failed to prevent the spread of misinformation and “prioritise[s] the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts”.
The problem with Facebook is that its entire business model depends on two key elements: (1) growth in the number of ‘desirable users’, meaning those in the younger demographic in the developed world that are most sought after by advertisers, and (2) an increase in the amount of time people spend on the site.
It should not be surprising that Facebook does a ton of research on how to drive up those numbers in order to generate algorithms that will achieve those goals. But what Haugen revealed is that when confronted with their own research that shows that the way to drive up those numbers means using techniques that foster hate and divisiveness and create mental health issues for younger people, Facebook invariably chose to ignore the dangers and plowed ahead.
As an example, Facebook’s own research showed that young people, especially girls, can suffer serious self-image issues the more time they spend of Facebook. But Facebook ignored that in an effort to attract more of them by starting something called Instagram Kids. The uproar over that move has resulted in a pause on Instagram Kids.
Another feature that Facebook knows about and that it exploits is that generating outrage results in people spending more time on their site. So the algorithms drive their users down rabbit holes that feed the outrage and it is not surprising that people end up in places that cater to extreme views and conspiracy theories. This explains why we now have escalating levels of outlandish claims and hyperventilating rhetoric. Outrage is a a beast that requires ever-increasing levels of toxicity to be satiated and that requires more time spent on the site.
Facebook has started its usual apology tour, the song-and-dance act it goes into whenever there is a fresh revelation of its awful practices, though they are finding it hard to tap dance around Haugen’s insider testimony.
The Facebook executive Nick Clegg took a damage-limitation tour of US political talkshows on Sunday, but remained evasive over questions about the social media giant’s contribution to the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year.
The former British deputy prime minister, now Facebook vice-president of global affairs, was responding to a barrage of damaging claims from the whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Appearing before a Senate committee this week, Haugen said a proliferation of misinformation and unchecked hate speech on Facebook helped encourage the pro-Trump mob that stormed Congress, seeking to overturn the election result.
…Clegg insisted individuals were responsible for their own actions on 6 January, and would not say if he believed Facebook bore any responsibility for amplifying toxic messaging such as Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election.
“Given that we have thousands of algorithms and millions of people using it, I can’t give you a yes or no answer to individual personalised feeds each person uses,” Clegg told CNN’s State of the Union.
…A week ago, Clegg criticized suggestions that social media contributed to the insurrection as “ludicrous”, and strongly resisted claims that Facebook ignored problems on its platform.
But after Haugen’s searing testimony that Facebook was harming children and damaging democracy globally in its quest to place “astronomical profits before people”, Clegg cut a more contrite figure on CNN, NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week.
Tech reporter Kevin Roose argues that what he sees in the revelations is a company that is in a desperation mode. He says that what keeps Facebook executives up at night is not the threats of lawsuits (that it has ample resources to fight) or fines (that it can easily afford to pay) or Congressional investigations or government regulations (that it feels that it can circumvent) but an existential threat that they cannot control: they are losing the desired younger demographic that is the key to their revenue stream. He points out that social media companies come and go as young people’s tastes change and that Facebook may be seeing its future as similar to that of Friendster and MySpace, both major players of their time that eventually became irrelevant. While Facebook has outlasted them, it is already seen by young people as a space for old people, which is a devastating image for the company..
All these problems have led to speculations that Facebook may be on the way out, sooner than we may think.
It won’t be soon enough for me.
Wishful thinking.
It’s been widely publicised over and over again for something like 50 years that (a) cigarettes (and other forms of burning tobacco) cause cancer, (b) tobacco companies knew this from the beginning, and (c) the tobacco companies are doing their best to get more people in the USA and elsewhere addicted to them.
Yet Big Tobacco is doing just fine. And they can’t even hide behind “freeze peach.”
I think that the “their own research shows their prodcut is harmful” card will lead to some sort of regulation. That’s what worked with the tobacco companies. But, as Allison said, it didn’t end them.
What might is the ephemeral nature of the product, but also the apparent stupidity of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s difficult to see how a “boy genius” can take a successfu company, albeit one that has a limited lifetime, to having every entity in the world not only hate it, but say that it’s destroying society.
Only a lot of bad decisions, in fact all bad decisions, could have done that. And, no one who can’t figure out how to do better is “smart”. Zuck’s problem might be that he became successful at 19, and didn’t need to grow up (after all, if you’re already a genius success, you are perfect and don’t need to change), so he never did, and is still on the decision-making and wisdom level of a sophomore. Guess he’ll learn the hard way.
I think that there will be some regulations to ratchet Facebook back, but the only reason it might die is the nature of social media. Zuck will be way too stupid to figure out how to survive that, even as a smaller entity. He’s exploring nonsense like virtual reality (Facebook *already* is not true reality), which will never succeed.
Now I think of it, Zuck’s never actually had an idea. He apparently took the idea of Facebook from an acquaintance and those twins, and hasn’t ever had a creative idea of his own. So, it’s very unlikely that he can think of a strategy to address the limited lifetime of a social network, and how to transition that into a longer-lasting, though smaller, enterprise.
His CFO, the woman who wrote the “lean in” book, said that he’s “like a child”. Just who you want as the head of a company.
Nothing is impossible. Myspace was huge and still failed, and google has failed repeatedly at creating a social network. The US phone monopoly was broken up by force, and the threat of real action forced microsoft to change its tack.
Allison (#1) --
Big tobacco shifted away from primarily G7 markets to the developing world (mostly Asia and Africa) where incomes have been rising and anti-smoking laws either don’t exist, are anemic, or tobacco companies can use bribery or violent force to prevent such laws from being written. The G7 governments willingly let them predate on the poor in those countries, primarily because they’re not white (see: the addiction of North American people to alcohol 200-300 years ago, the UK importing heroin into China and Southeast Asia 100 years ago).
“their own research shows their prodcut is harmful”
Heh, they “did their own research”, at least.
Facebook is going to eventually stumble like myspace did, but they’re not being stupid -- in other parts of the world they are maneuvering to become “the internet” for all intents and purposes, which puts them on a collision course with google. It’s too much to hope that they’ll destroy each other.
What annoys me is that the internet ad economy is so obviously bogus and over-valued. Investors are being sold an image of infinite growth, but in fact the growth is in terms of sockpuppets and AIs. Eventually nobody’ll be seeing the ads at all, except robots and marketing people. The way to destroy the big tech companies is to cut off their oxygen, which is the ad revenues. If people stop buying based on ads, those sites would be dead in a year. The trick is that people have to announce they are doing that.
Further to Intransitive’s point, John Oliver on tobacco companies.
If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
Facebook kicked me off years ago. My crime was refusing to use my real name. Shrug, who cares. Almost no one I know or knew long ago is on Facebook anyway.
To be sure, the Internet is changing all the time. It’s not that impossible.
What Facebook will probably due is identify the up and coming social media companies and then, just buy them. It’s what Google, Intel, and all the rest do all the time. Google owns Youtube and Facebook owns Instagram.
It’s just unfortunate that we’re not demanding at the same time that other large media companies with similar business models need to clean up their acts too. When the mainstream news lies to us for decades about practically everything, there aren’t investigations. Almost nobody ever says they should be nationalized, broken up, or simply demolished. The elites in those companies can spread misinformation and hate all day long. They can sell us war and capitalism and racism, decade after decade, and it just doesn’t seem to matter enough for there to be any significant consequences, when people even recognize that it’s happening at all.
We gave the big networks a very lucrative and privileged status, when gave them control over the airwaves. It was supposed to come with the condition that they must provide a public service in return, in the form of quality journalism. But just look at the utter crap that we got from them instead, with almost no standards to speak of except for banning dirty words and porn. You’ll need to spend lots of time just trying to make sense of it all, because half of it will be wasted on fucking commercial breaks. Somehow, whenever this conversation starts about the problems of “social media,” all of this just seems to be invisible to a lot of people. “That’s just the way it is.”
But as soon as ordinary non-elites start lying and spewing hate and so forth, then it’s a big new “social media” problem, and we need to crack down on it for the sake of “democracy.” Fuck Facebook, sure, but I don’t think this can be taken very seriously, unless we’re also willing to take a hard look at the networks, cable channels, PBS, NPR, local television and radio, newspapers, or anything else in the media landscape. They offer us endless amounts of misinformation, stupidity, and hateful garbage. They have done so from the beginning, and we’ve done nothing to address that. It may even be worse now than it ever was. So, looking at several other comments above, saying that Facebook is probably safe … that sounds like a pretty good bet to me. And if Facebook does go down for whatever reason, while something else takes its place and nothing else really changes, I think we’ll still be facing all of the same problems.
“Facebook may be on the way out”
Call me uninterested. I’ve never used it and am sure that if it’s gone it will be replaced by something equally or more silly, idiot and/or ugly.
Marcus R @5 is right, “the internet ad economy is so obviously bogus and over-valued.” I can’t think why some company would pay a lot to get such exact, detailed, mostly pretty meaningless, data about everyone in the world. Yes, I know that targeted advertising is probably better than random, but really, *that* level of specificity is worth all that ad money?
A while back, Google got caught when it issued a (mandatory) Chrome update in which it was discovered that the default setting (hidden deep in the Advanced settings) was that any website you visited was allowed to turn on your device’s microphone without your knowledge. The website presumably recorded the ambient sound and went through that for keywords that they thought would be useful.
My first thought was, there are some companies *paying* Google for this info? Random conversations, me talking to my cats, millions of hours of junk? It is a complete scam that advertisers naively think is worth paying internet companies for. If they’ll pay for background noise to “help” their advertising, they’ll pay for anything, and it’s completely overhyped and overvalued.
The targeting makes it a little more efficient though, and it’s automated. It sounds like you’re assuming that it’s gotta be more expensive for them. But there doesn’t need to be any extra money spent on that. You can make more sales, while spending the same amount or less on the ads.
And from their point of view, finding little ways to boost their own profits (even by a small amount) is better than spending that money on wages and benefits for employees.
Or if you spend a little on public good will with a PR campaign, that’s not so much about sales, but you may be able to save yourself a lot in the form of taxes, regulations, expensive court cases, and so forth. But also, it may mean some are more inclined to shop with you too or to stay loyal to your brand.
Well, that definitely sounds more relevant to the CIA or organized crime or whatever. But I doubt they would pay anyone for it.
As raven said above in #7, FaceborG will acquire any rivals that make off with their youth demographic. Assimilation is the concept, and when Facebook coalesces with Google, then FaceborG will be the new world ruler by default.
I can’t remember the source now, but about a year ago I read about an academic study that was published that found that targeted advertising was only 3% more effective than random ads.
Thanks, Trickster G. @12, now we know how much companies make from hoovering up every detail about 8 billion people.
CR @11, it does cost companies something, though, to keep up the computers and software and pay the personnel who run them, to scan emails and backgroud noise, etc., for keywords. I wonder if they’ve calculated how much they make (3% more) vs. how much it costs?
And yeah, advertisers and websites were paying Google for the recorded background noise. When this dodge was discovered, Google reluctantly had to issue new updates where the microphone was not turned on by default. I suppose they still try to record you, but some other way. I once saw a photo of Zuck with his laptop on the desk behind him: he had duct tape over the camera and Kleenex stuffed into the microphone port. He knows what internet companies do because his company does that too, or tries to.
I’ve cudgeled my brain as to why anyone would buy background noise, and all I can think of is that they run it through voice recognition (automated, as you say) and have it listen for keywords that are, say, the names of products or whatever they’re targeting. Or, that they may hope to record the sound of your TV in the background, to hear what shows you’re watching, or something. Really useless flogging of a silly idea (hoovering up so much trivial data).
garnetstar:
Maybe some do, but the one thing I know is that they’re not all rational actors. I was thinking before that a lot of these deals executives make with marketing types are probably just as full of collusion, bribery, nepotism, magical thinking, bullshit, and pandering as anything you’ll see in the political sphere. If it makes you and the shareholders happy, do it.
They can still make tons of money, even with all of the waste, and those sorts of people do still tend to fail upwards. So everybody can be happy and the whole farce can continue. If they need to, they can always just reach for convenient options like layoffs or outsourcing or driving up prices.
For a commercial site, I don’t think they’d care about (or be capable of processing) what’s happening most of the time. But if they want to listen in at key moments while you’re on the site doing something very specific, maybe they think that would be useful somehow. It still sounds pretty useless and obviously very invasive. But they’re certainly willing to try anything, even if it’s stupid and/or awful.
Another possibility, not advertising, but still in the corporate world (besides garden-variety corporate espionage):
Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home
That’s about webcams, but microphones could be used for similar purposes. It might be as simple as “how much time has this customer service rep spent talking today?” (They already track numbers of calls and their duration and metrics like that.)
I guess it may also be harder to tell that one has been turned on, with no indicator light. And of course, it wouldn’t help to point it in another direction like you could with a webcam, since it can still pick up sound in the room.
I believe the approach with a lot of this stuff is to build the features and collect the data first, then figure out if you can do anything useful with it later.
The whole thinking behind targeted advertising seems to be that if you’re looking for needles in haystacks, you should start by building the biggest haystack you possibly can. Hey, if you throw enough statistical analysis at enough noise, you can always pull something out, right?
> Consciousness razor:
“But the one thing I know is that they’re not all rational actors”.
Yes, this. I really get the impression that all this hoovering of data is driven by the convinction that “data is the new gold”, so if they can they do every time, it all the time. Where that idea was born and why, I’d bet they don’t even know, but if everyone is doing it, it must be a good idea, no? No?
“Well, that definitely sounds more relevant to the CIA or organized crime or whatever”.
Sinister but correct. I can see a lot of opportunities for doing crimes with all dem buckets of data, but legitimate, public-interest stuff? Zero. At most, serving ads which will be disregarded or forgotten 0,001s later. It will be interesting to see if/when the shoe truly drops, and they realize they have been hoarding mounds of useless shit.