Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto, penned
clearly in response to accusations levelled at the social network in the wake
of the bitter US election campaign, is a scary, dystopian document. It shows
that Facebook - launched, in Zuckerberg's own words five years ago, to
"extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships" - is
turning into something of an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected
government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social
engineering.
In 2012, Zuckerberg addressed future Facebook investors
in a letter attached to the company's initial public offering prospectus.
Here's how he described the company's purpose:
People sharing more — even if just with their close
friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better
understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this
creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it
helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By
helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread
and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should
resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer,
rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We
also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental
principle of this rewiring.
Whatever those beliefs were based on, they have largely
failed the test of time. Instead of creating stronger relationships,
Facebook has spawned anxieties and addictions that are the subject of
academic studies from Portugal to Australia. Some studies
have determined that using Facebook detracts from a user's life satisfaction.
A Danish experiment in 2015, involving people
weaned from Facebook for a week and a control group that kept using it, showed
that people on the social network are 55 percent more likely to feel stressed;
one of the sources of that stress is envy of the glossified lives reported by
other users. Users' well-being, research has showed, only tends
to increase when they have meaningful interactions - such as long
message exchanges - with those who are already close to them.
In his latest manifesto, Zuckerberg uses parenting
groups as an example of something his company does right. But
recent research shows that some new mothers use Facebook to obtain
validation of their self-perception as good parents, and failing to get enough
such validation causes depressive symptoms.
As for the "rewired" information
infrastructure, it has helped to chase people into ideological silos and feed
them content that reinforces confirmation biases. Facebook actively created the
silos by fine-tuning the algorithm that lies at its centre - the one that forms
a user's news feed. The algorithm prioritizes what it shows a user
based, in large measure, on how many times the user has recently interacted
with the poster and on the number of "likes" and comments the post
has garnered. In other words, it stresses the most emotionally engaging posts
from the people to whom you are drawn - during an election campaign, a
recipe for a filter bubble and, what's more, for amplifying emotional rather
than rational arguments.
Bragging
Bragging in his new manifesto, Zuckerberg writes:
"In recent campaigns around the world - from India and Indonesia across
Europe to the United States -- we've seen the candidate with the largest and
most engaged following on Facebook usually wins." In the Netherlands today,
liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte's page has 17 527 likes; that of fiery
nationalist Geert Wilders, 174 188. In France, rationalist Emmanuel Macron has
165 850 likes, while far-right Marine Le Pen boasts 1.2 million. Helping them
win is hardly something that would make Zuckerberg, a liberal, proud - but,
with his algorithmic interference in what people can see on his network, he has
created a powerful tool for populists.
Zuckerberg doesn't want to correct this mistake and stop
messing with what people see on the social network. Instead, the
new manifesto talks about Facebook as if it were a country or a
supranational bloc rather than just a communication-enabling technology.
Zuckerberg describes how Facebook sorts groups into "meaningful" and,
presumably, meaningless ones. Instead of facilitating communication
among people who are already part of social support groups offline, he
wants to project Facebook relationships into the real world: Clearly, that's a
more effective way of keeping competitors at bay.
Read also: Facebook CEO warns against reversal of global thinking
The Facebook chief executive says his team is
working on artificial intelligence that will be able to flag posts containing
offensive information -nudity, violence, hate speech - and pass them on for
final decisions by humans. If past experience is any indication, the overtaxed
humans will merely rubber-stamp most decisions made by the technology, which
Zuckerberg admits is still highly imperfect. Zuckerberg also suggests enabling
every user to apply the filters provided by this technology:
Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic
content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings. We will
periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and so you don't
need to dig around to find them. For those who don't make a decision, the
default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a
referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings
anytime.
The real-life effect will be that most users, too lazy to
muck around with settings, will accept the "majority" standard,
making it even less likely that anything they see would jar them out of their
comfort zone. Those who use the filters won't be much better off: They'll have
no idea what is being filtered out because Facebook's algorithms are a black
box.
Global community
Zuckerberg casts Facebook as a global community that
needs better policing, governance, nudging toward better social practices. He's
willing to allow some democracy and "referendums," but the company
will make the ultimate decision on the types of content people should see based
on their behaviour on Facebook. Ultimately, this kind of social engineering
affects people's moods and behaviours. It can drive them toward
commercial interactions or stimulate giving to good causes but it can also
spill out into the real world in more troubling ways.
It's absurd to expect humility from Silicon Valley heroes.
But Zuckerberg should realise that by trying to shape how people use Facebook,
he may be creating a monster. His company's other services - Messenger and
WhatsApp - merely allow users to communicate without any interference,
and that simple function is the source of the least controversial examples
in Zuckerberg's manifesto. "In Kenya, whole villages are in WhatsApp
groups together, including their representatives," the Facebook CEO
writes. Well, so are my kids' school mates, and that's great.
People are grateful for tools that help them work, study,
do things together - but they respond to shepherding in unpredictable ways.
"Virtual identity suicide" is one; the trend doesn't show up in
Facebook's reported usage numbers, but that might be because a lot of the
"active users" the company reports are actually bots. If you type
"how to leave" into the Google search window, "how to leave
Facebook" will be the first suggestion.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of
the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky
is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian
business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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