IT’S TIME FOR ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS TO BE REGULATED

 

…Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook says all the right things, but then he does nothing to fix Facebook's improper moves 

 

The Facebook founder's favorite motto: “Move fast and break things,” is a perfect expression of “consequence-free behavior.”

 

 

OK, so what do we know about the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen?

It has become very clear from the copies of Facebook documents that she discussed on the CBS’s, 60 Minutes, that Facebook puts money over the safety of their users.

Per Ms. Haugen: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they (Facebook) will make less money.”

She left Facebook last spring as a member of their Civic Integrity Team.

No, Haugen didn’t work with any of Facebook’s upper management,  But she had access to many of their confidential communications, which she brought to both 60 Minutes and the U.S. Congress.

She has now testified to both 60 Minutes and the U.S. Congress, which was covered by hours of TV showing her testimony.  This wasn’t just Haugen’s opinion as a digital-economy veteran, with a long stint at Google before she joined Facebook. She had the goods on Facebook’s upper management. The huge trove of documents that she took when she left the behemoth social network spells out their ugly incentive structure.  That is, in case you had any remaining doubt:  It shows that outrage, hate and lies are what drive digital engagement, and therefore their tremendous revenue.

She stated that: “The system is broken. And we all suffer from it.”

This is the reason that even though I have a position on Facebook, I seldom do more than checking out some of the pictures and comments that I receive from Facebook.  Many times, I just delete the Facebook e-mails.  It is also why  my wife does not have anything to do with any social media platform.

The question now is: “How to fix it?”

It is a problem that threatens the underpinnings of our social media society and it calls for a radical solution.  Such as a new federal agency focused on the digital and tech economy.

This idea comes from none other than a former Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Tom Wheeler, who maintains that neither his agency nor the Federal Trade Commission are nimble or tech-savvy enough.  Enough to protect consumers in this volatile and evolving industry.  “You need an agency that doesn’t say ‘here are the rigid rules,’ when the rules become obsolete almost immediately,” Wheeler, who headed the FCC from 2013 to 2017, said all this last Monday.  Many think it should be a new operation that is totally tech savvy, and that understands the algorithms that the social media platforms use.  Also, how they work for their profitability.

That’s too much of how the digital world operates according to Facebook’s founder: Mark Zuckerberg.  Whose famous motto is: “Move fast and break things.”  Which is a perfect expression of what Wheeler called “consequence-free behavior.”

If we really want to think about the public interest in the fast-paced digital world, it’ll be necessary to revise, “the cumbersome, top-down rule-making process that has been in place since the industrial era.” That is as Wheeler wrote in a Harvard Shorenstein Center paper, with Phil Verveer, the Justice Department lead counsel on a suit that resulted in the breakup of AT&T.  The paper also includes inputs from Gene Kimmelman, a prominent consumer-protection advocate.

Digital platforms such as Facebook and Google have become “pseudo-governments that make their own rules,” Wheeler said that It’s no surprise that Facebook make the rules to benefit themselves.

The existing regulatory structure just doesn’t work, Wheeler argued this in a Brookings Institution piece. The FCC and FTC are filled with dedicated professionals but are constrained  from doing anything about the social media platforms. Their antitrust actions may grab headlines but they don’t protect against more general consumer abuses.  That includes those take-it-or-leave-it “terms and conditions” that are forced on its customers.

It’s not as though Facebook hasn’t been punished for its offenses.

In 2019, the FTC slapped the company with a record-breaking $5 billion dollar fine for deceiving billions of users and failing to protect their privacy.

But such a penalty doesn’t address the issues that Haugen was talking about on 60 Minutes, or those that she was discussing when she testified before Congress.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” she told CBS. “Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

Haugen’s simple delivery made for a powerful interview, hammering home the details of the shocking information she shared with the Wall Street Journal for its recent blockbuster investigation, called the: Facebook Files.

Among the revelations: Facebook is thoroughly aware that the mental health of teens is damaged by its engagement with Instagram, which it owns.  Many teenagers have stated that  “Instagram increases the rates of anxiety and depression in all teen women.”  This was stated by them on an a slide from an internal Facebook presentation.  And they have done little or nothing to change that fact.

Despite its constant protestations to the contrary, Facebook has built a business model that it knows full well that it relies on the anger and outrage of its nearly 3 billion users to keep them engaged and clicking.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among Facebook re-shares,” its own data scientists concluded

As Haugen explained, this phenomenon motivates politicians not just to communicate differently, but to govern differently.  They do this by embracing less reasonable, more outrage-inducing policy positions. You can see this playing out in extreme rhetoric on emotional issues such as immigration policy.  Facebook’s practices, Haugen believes, even propelled the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by allowing misinformation to flourish and organizers to congregate on its sites.

As expected, Facebook’s representatives deny many of Haugen’s charges, calling some of them ludicrous.  “We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content,” said Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch. “To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”

Company founder, Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has repeatedly said he thinks more regulation is necessary.  (That is as long as it doesn’t cut into profits, one can assume he means.)

That all sounds mighty reasonable, and mighty familiar.  Zuckerberg loves to apologize sincerely, but then they just carry on without any changes.

Facebook keeps growing in size, value and influence,  This vividly demonstrates when the massive platform crashed for 5 hours just this Monday, along with its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp.  It disrupted an enormous chunk of the planet that has come to rely on Facebook.

Yes, something has to change. And that doesn’t mean a little tinkering around the edges of what already exists.

It’s time for the monster social media and technology companies to deal with regulations like other giant operations.

Copyright G. Ater 2021