Jill Lepore: Facebook's Broken Vows
A modern history from today's best "warts and all" historian.
Lapore likens Zuckerberg's monopoly power to Rockefeller's. Her excellent section on the muckraking and groundbreaking journalism of Ida Tarbell gives us an idea of how important Biden's latest anti-trust appointments are in checking "one of the world's most dangerous monopolies."
from The New Yorker, August 2 2021
(paragraphs broken up for readability).
Facebooks stated mission amounts to the salvation of humanity. In truth, the purpose of Facebook, a multinational corporation with headquarters in California, is to make money for its investors. Facebook is an advertising agency: it collects data and sells ads. Founded in 2004, it now has a market value of close to a trillion dollars. Since 2006, with the launch of its News Feed, Facebook has also been a media company, one that now employs fifteen thousand content moderators. (In the U.S., about a third of the population routinely get their news from Facebook. In other parts of the world, as many as two-thirds do.)
Since 2016, Facebook has become interested in election integrity here and elsewhere; the company has thirty-five thousand security specialists in total, many of whom function almost like a U.N. team of elections observers. But its early mantra, Company over country, still resonates. The company is, in important respects, larger than any country. Facebook possesses the personal data of more than a quarter of the worlds people, 2.8 billion out of 7.9 billion, and governs the flow of information among them. The number of Facebook users is about the size of the populations of China and India combined. In some corners of the globe, including more than half of African nations, Facebook provides free basic data services, positioning itself as a privately owned utility...
Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together is a statement to be found in Facebooks Terms of Service; everyone who uses Facebook implicitly consents to this mission. During the years of the companys ascent, the world has witnessed a loneliness epidemic, the growth of political extremism and political violence, widening political polarization, the rise of authoritarianism, the decline of democracy, a catastrophic crisis in journalism, and an unprecedented rise in propaganda, fake news, and misinformation. By no means is Facebook responsible for these calamities, but evidence implicates the company as a contributor to each of them. In July, President Biden said that misinformation about covid-19 on Facebook is killing people. ....
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/02/facebooks-broken-vows
Sidebar
Lawmakers used the session as an excuse to grill Facebook about privacy too, with Democratic senator Dick Durbin asking: "Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?"
The point was to illustrate Facebook's uncanny ability to show people ads and friend recommendations based on their whereabouts.
Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg said no.
https://i.insider.com/5ade4f0619ee864f008b46fd?width=1300&format=jpeg&auto=webp
Pinback
(12,131 posts)the more grandiose and sanctimonious its mission statement."
Facebook exemplifies this phenomenon.
Important article. Thanks for the heads up. And the new book from Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang looks like it will shed new light on this reckless enterprise, so I look forward to that as well.
Not holding my breath that it will sway many Facebook addicts, but it will be interesting to see what comes from the increased scrutiny.
ancianita
(35,704 posts)Jill Lepore's been a bit uneven in her New Yorker pieces in the last year or so, but this one is solidly among her best essays.
I'll be interested in what Biden's anti-trust appointees at DOJ, Jonathan Kanter and Tim Wu, do about Facebook. They've been at it for awhile, but they'll now have to go from breaking up a megacorp to breaking up the biggest nation on the planet -- the United States v Facebookistan.
Jim__
(14,035 posts)As the article noted, Facebook's best chance of exploiting people comes through news stories with powerful emotional appeals.
I'm not sure how we can address what is a serious problem. Even if Trump gets back in power and implements censorship of news; Facebook can continue to promote its own success by pumping out highly emotional stories that appeal to Trump supporters.
I'd say our democracy is facing serious threats to its continued existence.
ancianita
(35,704 posts)I hear you about what we saw, and how Trump got so much free exposure and data. While Zuckerberg doesn't really care, we've since learned that there's more in front of us that endangers democracy, and Zuckerberg likely knows it, too. Climate won't wait for the democracy vote. What could happen in international states of emergency will likely have to be swift autocratic decisions necessary to save millions.
What I'm seeing is that while democracy requires willing, conscious & able participants, it's easier for Zuckerberg to minimally mollify governments, talk commitment but churn profits from a population bigger than those of India and China combined, and then as cascading climate catastrophes bear down on all of us, he still has no way to command resources or coordinate any help for his billions -- help that only governments can give.
Again. Facebook won't keep the lights on. Climate won't wait for the democratic vote. Both are dangers to us because if we don't get control of monopolies -- break them up, tax them, put them to charter death for human harm they've already caused -- they will literally waste human time, money and energy that is better spent on setting up a livable energy future that our descendants won't curse us for.
I have to say, we can't even mobilize this democracy against venal politics & corruption, let alone 20 costly climate crises of the last two years. The future will demand more quick congressional decisions like this latest funding for saving 50,000 Afghanis, but Congress isn't ready and the autocrats among us are not ready.
Xi Jinping bets his way will work better than Biden's. From what I've seen of Chinese priorities in spending and mobilization, he's not wrong.