Between fake news and data harvesting, Facebook has no way to win
Between fake news and data harvesting, Facebook has no way
to win
By Leonid Bershidsky March 23, 2018 | 5:01am | Updated
Mark Zuckerberg is stuck in a catch-22. Any fix for
Facebook’s previous big problem — fake news — would make the current big
problem with data harvesting worse.
As a media company and one of Americans’ top sources of
information, Facebook’s de facto anonymity and general lack of responsibility
for user-generated content make it easy for propagandists to exploit. Making matters
worse, it isn’t willing to impose tighter identification rules for fear of
losing too many users, and it doesn’t want to be held responsible in any way
for content, preferring to present itself as a neutral platform.
So Zuckerberg has been trying to fix the problem by
showing people more material from friends and family and by prioritizing
“trusted publishers” and local news sources over purveyors of fake news.
But the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows people may not
be OK with Facebook’s data gathering, improved or not.
The scandal follows the revelation (to most Facebook
users who read about it) that, until 2015, application developers on the social
network’s platform were able to get information about a user’s Facebook friends
after asking permission in the most perfunctory way. The 2012 Obama campaign
used this functionality. So — though in a more underhanded way — did Cambridge
Analytica.
Many people are angry at Facebook for not acting more
resolutely to prevent the abuse, but if that were the whole problem, it would
have been enough for Zuckerberg to apologize and point out that the offending
functionality hasn’t been available for several years.
The #deletefacebook campaign is, however, powered by a
bigger problem than that. People are worried about the data Facebook is
accumulating about them and about how these data are used. Facebook itself
works with political campaigns to help them target messages; it did so for the
Trump campaign, too, perhaps helping it more than CA did.
The anger over this incident is akin to the more benign
outbreak of anti-Facebook fervor in 2014 after revelations Facebook had been
running secret psychological experiments on users, attempting to alter their
mood by tweaking their newsfeeds. People may give up personal data easily for
the sake of convenience, but they hate being turned into guinea pigs.
Is there a Zuckerberg response that would reassure users
that this is not going to happen to them? In theory, sure. Zuckerberg could say
his platform would reject all political advertising, take measures against all
data scraping and provide no data to political actors. That, however, would be
a slippery slope; nobody wants to be a guinea pig for big corporations, either.
Smaller sacrifices, however, may be useless against the
critical mass of popular disapproval. What do people want from Zuckerberg,
anyway? Do they want an environment that produces lots of quality data or do
they want Facebook to stop collecting data? Both? But then, how would Facebook
make money?
Or perhaps neither? Would the world be a worse place
without Facebook? People can always have an uncivil conversation with bots
about divisive politics on Twitter. They can stay in touch with friends,
family, neighbors and co-workers on any of the numerous messenger apps. Young people
are giving up on it, and Germany’s new digital minister Dorothee Baer recently
teased it for turning into “a senior citizens’ network.” But what’s keeping the
older generations on it except inertia?
Zuckerberg probably won’t make any radical moves. But
what if he did? What if the Facebook CEO makes an announcement?
“We’ve come so far from that dorm room at Harvard,” he’d
say. “Perhaps too far. I’m sad to announce that today, we’re closing the main
Facebook app and website: It’s clear that it’s been abused by anyone and
everyone, including ourselves, and you folks no longer want it. We’ll still
help connect the world through Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. We promise
they won’t turn into another Facebook.”
Would there be many people — except perhaps the remaining
Facebook shareholders — who wouldn’t heave a sigh of relief? I know I would.
© 2018, Bloomberg View
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