Facebook, Facebook, Facebook: we can’t think of anything else?
Guess what: last week, the discussion around the lack of transparency at the most prominent content platform in the world stood alive and kicking. The fire came from all sides, starting with accusations regarding the seriousness of the Covid-19 vaccine hoaxes circulating at the tech giant until the blocking of external monitoring of Instagram. If you dig in, there is more, much more. Why are we addicted to Facebook even when not using it?
Facebook is under eternal fire for several reasons, but the main one is a conflict between their users’ goals and the company’s own goals. The platform generates money by inducing users to perform actions that will open space for advertisers, and there is no better way than providing them with content they have interacted with in the past. This is the recipe for the information bubbles polarising societies. Initially, users wanted to stay in touch with friends, but if you use Facebook a lot, you will soon changing your behaviour for another reason. People love to hear they are right, that their ideas are better and confirming the beliefs they have more than they like to stay in touch with friends. And if your friends follow the same pattern, then the match is even better.
The problem is that the design of the system implies choices that have profound, serious consequences. By manipulating the behaviour of users to fill advertisers needs, the company lock people into clusters. These clusters talk to each other very rarely. After a while, the members in one group will be so calcified in their ideas that they won’t remember the past, let alone understand other points of view. The phenomenon is not related to education, but less educated and older segments fall prey easier than educated ones. This is why conservatives tend to be more identified with spreading fake news; their demographics make them more vulnerable. And make no mistake: there is no disinformation only in one part of the spectre.
Facebook’s leverage in the game became so big that its core business is now deeply rooted in the problem. Another factor is that the company is relentless in their PR. You probably noticed how the word “metaverse” became ubiquitous in the last two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg explained his vision for the new technology. The company intends to become so pervasive for its users that at a point, we won’t know if we are on Facebook or not.
The release of new technology is one of the steps of the social giant towards domination. Facebook users who acquired a new mobile cannot use WhatsApp if they don’t sign up to the new terms of service that brings your exposure one degree higher. FB must expand the tool into payments and many more (emulating Chinese app WeChat) if it wants to make WhatsApp the main app to swallow e-commerce and payments markets.
Facebook takes more of the fire, but they are not the hell alone. Twitter has or had ties with Saudi Arabia (the country with the app’s highest penetration rate). Google makes a lot of money from disinformation-related ads, and other companies do no better protecting citizens’ interests that do not match their core businesses. When the game becomes big enough, you become a hostage of it if no rules are enforced.
The criticism of the company brings no problems to its business side. Facebook market cap had an astonishing increase. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the fire against Facebook became much harder, the value of the company exploded, going from US$270 billion in 2016 to more than US$1 trillion at the moment. The scary part is that even when Facebook has been heavily fined, its shares price only grew.
It shows that the system is broken. It is not Facebook’s fault. Regulation should not depend on the goodwill of companies. If governments around the world are failing to live up to their words, societies are as well. In the meantime, investors flock to get profits from the company’s practices everyone condemns. The tech giants are among the top lobbyist groups in the US and the European Union, but if you see the financial pressure that industries that pharmaceuticals and military put on writing laws, you’d understand why things are as they are and realise that the tech giants are doing what corporations do.
The digital environment needs regulation. It’s so obvious that you even feel stupid stating it. But regulation is no silver bullet either: first, it won’t solve the problem alone, and second, it opens the door for populists of all sorts to shake up democracy when their house of cards starts falling. The real solution will come from society because lawmaking follows a framework inherited from the pre-digital era. Uber is disrupting markets, and its drivers are complaining for years, but very little has been done, to mention one example. The lack of international laws that provide a uniform background for countries to cooperate is virtually impossible to be fixed. The events needed to bring seismic changes only come after the earthquake. The world has lived for almost half a century with a visible political instability before doing something to promote change — only triggered by a tragedy that had the cost of more than 70 million dead.
So, what else we can do? The post-pandemic era is the perfect environment to make profound changes. Governments need to invest in speeding the economy, innovation tends to flourish, and harmful practices like fossil fuel and disinformation are finally perceived as bad things. Because of the meagre interest rates, investors are hungry for riskier business (and more robust profit chunks). As I suggested a few weeks ago, the way here is not to invest in companies but in potential industries to solve problems. Protecting privacy can generate a solid sector now that people understand they are naked in the street. Data ownership is another cause with very few actors. If we follow the pattern and channel resources to tackle issues, it will be a win-win situation. The problem is to evaluate how reversible the polarisation in some markets, like Brazil and the US. It may be too late already
Would Facebook complain about regulation? Probably. But I do not doubt that the company, which has an exceptional capacity to react, would be benefited in the end, just as users and shareholders. Convincing boards to drop good revenue sources is very hard, but when laws curb practices, they need to obey. In the end, well-done could even bring Facebook users and shareholders to have common goals again. And still, some people don’t believe in happy endings…
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
