Abstract
It took five American deaths during the terrorist attacks on the US Capitol for Facebook to finally acknowledge its power and responsibility as a publisher. The site indefinitely blocked President Trump’s account on January 7, stating that his actions were undermining the peaceful transition of power. Facebook’s independent oversight committee is now tasked with examining whether that decision was correct.
I say “American deaths” because, of course, Facebook has, notoriously, enabled propaganda that has fuelled hatred and murder elsewhere in the world, most notably in Myanmar. At least 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been murdered across the country and an estimated 700,000 forced to leave – the largest exodus in Asia since the Vietnam war. Most of the population had no internet before Facebook offered subsidised access through its app. Hence, the words “internet” and “Facebook” became synonymous. Misinformation and hate speech on Facebook reinforced a brutal military campaign of persecution against Rohingya communities.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the site was slow to act; nuanced socio-political policy is not a priority nor top of the skillset for a Californian technology company better able to devise pretty social graphs. There has been no willingness to publicly accept or discuss the profound social impact of connecting 2.7billion people in massively diverse and culturally complex communities, nor to consider how the mechanics of social connection would impact on information spread. Facebook wanted us to believe the world would behave in line with its pretty social graphs, but of course humans simply deployed Facebook to meet their own needs, and some of those were less than altruistic. The company is worth about $780billion and its priority is making money. It has always been its policy to feign a position of neutrality, of “free speech”. But there is no such thing as “free” in the world of Facebook – someone always pays.
Facebook’s users have been duped in two powerful ways. First, information is given credibility by being published on a platform with an international reputation. Publication itself appears to be an endorsement and lends stories credibility. Second, information is shared between friends and trusted contacts – social reinforcement that adds credibility to stories, however dubious.
It’s not just the developing world that has been duped. I’ve observed the split between those suspicious of the Covid vaccine on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, many of those people seem to be on the right, spurred on by Trump’s ignorant, incoherent and anti-science ramblings. In the UK, the suspicion appears more on the left, with the “conspirituality” movement, conspiracy theories colliding with alternative ideologies around wellbeing. Note the £300 USB stick touted as a “5G Bioshield”. This is a medieval level of suspicion and science denial. But Covid-19 doesn’t care whether you put your faith in God or homeopathy – it’s coming for you, either way. I tried to explain this to confused relatives worrying about Covid conspiracies. Information is like food, and if you stuff your face with Facebook junk all day, you’re going to find it hard to make sensible, informed decisions. Stick to nutritious meals, I tell them, from information “restaurants” that you trust.
I looked back today to columns I wrote six years ago, worrying over the complexity of the challenge Facebook was unleashing. Its growth has been fuelled by several complex and interconnected factors: the rise of the smartphone and of global internet connectivity, and the demise of local news, which has partly contributed to, and been caused by, the rise of the social networks, in which news and information has become more partisan, more polarised, and distributed more through our personal networks.
Jaron Lanier, a reformed technologist who now acts as a kind of Silicon Valley shaman, once told me that by including attention metrics as part of its IPO valuation, Facebook had effectively changed and formalised the business model of technology platforms. Attracting as much time and attention as possible became a priority for every company after that. That’s time and attention – not quality and meaning, or benefit for the user. Our time and attention are the most precious things we have.
We are still so deeply inside the Facebook era that it is hard to see where this will end. But we could begin to hope that this is a tragedy in three acts, and one in which a more rational and responsible company eventually emerges.
If the first act was rampant growth, and the second a period of profound damage, then the third should be when both politics and society unite to demand that Facebook acknowledges its social responsibilities. The insidious protection of Section 230, the US law that frees technology “platforms” from the obligations and liabilities of publishers, must end. A revived Democratic administration will take this task seriously. The rest of us would do well to just switch Facebook off until it is resolved, because our time and attention are worth so much more than it can ever be worth.
